Pushed to the sword by Robin Hood
FENCING, like many small sports in South Africa, lacks money to send teams to big competitions like world championships.
So recently crowned SA champ Juliana Barrett and third-placed Tamryn Carfoot found a South African fencer living in Moscow to complete their epee team of three for the showpiece this week.
The compromise is that Ivana Simic comes with no ranking.
“Fencing in this country is self-funding,” said Barrett, a Texas-born New Yorker studying political science at Northwestern University in Chicago.
With a South African father and American mother, she regularly visits her largely Afrikaans-speaking family here.
“I don’t speak Afrikaans, but I can understand it a little,” said the southpaw who calls her grandmother ouma, pronouncing it with an American twang.
She took up fencing as a kid as a form of rehabilitation after fracturing her left leg when a heavy table fell on her during a class trip.
“My mom gave me an option of sports,” recalled Barrett, opting for fencing because she had been impressed by the swordfighting scenes in the old Robin Hood movies starring Errol Flynn.
She discovered later that her maternal grandfather was a fencer who had made the US Olympic trials years before.
Barrett, nearly 21, was part of the South African team that narrowly missed out on the 2012 Games.
She has climbed the world rankings since, into the top 50 at one stage.
But her chances of getting to the 2016 Rio Games are slim because of SA’s tough criteria — she has to leapfrog Africa’s topranked fencer, Paris-based Tunisian Sarra Besbes, who is No 13 in the world.