Sabre (fencing)

The guard is designed to provide the hand adequate protection to ensure that injury does not occur which may hinder the performance of the fencer.

The conventional handle of the sabre is shaped so that it may be held so that the hand may slide down to gain further extension of the weapon relative to the fencer.

The sabreur wears a lamé, a conductive jacket, to complete the circuit and register a touch to a valid target.

This is undesirable because it effectively extends the lamé onto the sabre, causing any blade contact to be registered as a valid touch.

The capteur was a small mechanical accelerometer that was intended to distinguish between a good cut and a mere touch of the blade against the target.

In November 2019, the FIE announced their intention to re-introduce the capteur to sabre using modern accelerometer technology.

When the blade comes into contact with the lamé, the electrical mask, or the manchette, current flows through the body cord and interacts with the scoring equipment.

As for all electrical apparatus used in modern fencing, the referee must take into account the possibility of mechanical failure.

[2]: t.80, t.99  Most sabre hits are registered by light signals placed on top of the sabre apparatus (red and green distinguishable for each fencer, with the light indicating the fencer who registered a hit) and accompanied by audible signal(s) [3]: m.51.3  consisting of either a short ring or a continuous note limited to two seconds.

The lockout period is the minimum amount of time between registered touches respective of the target area.

It was commonly regarded that the shorter timings would only encourage poor technique and an "attack only" mentality, negating much of the art of the sport.

However, the hit made with priority may arrive too late under the shorter timings to register, and so the stop-cuts and remises would indeed score.

With hindsight, the shorter timings seem to have encouraged a tightening and refinement of the original techniques with smaller, neater moves so that, on the whole, sabre fencing became faster and more precise than it had ever been before.

Subsequently, the rules of right of way have been altered simply to keep the strategy and technique of sabre interesting and (relatively) easy to understand.

There are also associated hand motions the referees will make to indicate specific calls in order to bridge a potential language barrier.

Most current referees are required to make calls both verbally and with the relevant hand motions to avoid any type of confusion.

Thus, the flèche attack is no longer permissible, so sabre fencers have instead begun to use a "flunge" (flying lunge).

This attack begins like a flèche, but the fencer pushes off from the ground and moves quickly forward, attempting to land a hit before their feet cross over.

Another example is when the fencer squats to the floor and takes a "Quinte" to both make themselves a smaller target and block their only weak point.