Page 21 - Fencing Booklet
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While the rules for each weapon are different, there are standards that apply to all three weapons. Competitions consist
of preliminary rounds, or pools, in which the competitors are divided into small groups of six or seven fencers who fence round-robin style against one another in five-touch bouts of three minutes’ maximum duration. (The duration
of a bout consists only of time spent fencing;
the referee will stop the clock when fencing
is not occurring.) The pools are followed by a series of direct elimination rounds, conducted along a bracket in which seeding is determined by performance in the pools. These direct elimination bouts are fenced to 15 touches,
each bout having a maximum duration of three periods of three minutes, with breaks between the periods. It should be noted that, unlike in foil and épée, sabre bouts proceed quite rapidly—15- touch bouts almost never exceed even a single three-minute period—so sabreists instead break for a minute’s rest after one fencer has scored eight touches.
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