Second Intention by Anthony Venner

it. ‘Five up and none down. It’ll do me nicely.’
    Yes, well might he be pleased. Five straight victories would put him into the DE with a nice high seeding, and a string of fairly easy opponents, at least to start with.
    I wished him well, we drained our cups and wandered down to see the listings.
    A modern fencing tournament is organised in a very specific way, to try and make sure that all the best fencers don ’t get knocked out early on. You start the event with an opening round in which all the competitors are put into pools, usually of six fencers, with all the competitors spread around according to their national rankings. You fight everybody else in your pool, and the results (the “pool sheets”) are then handed in to the organisers who then use a clever computer system to rank every fencer in the tournament according to their performance in that opening round. People with five straight victories are ranked at the top, followed by those with four, three, two and so on. To order the people who have the same number of victories they use a system called the indicator, where the number of hits a fencer receives is subtracted from the number of hits they scored, and this gives a number, either positive or negative, which allows all the fencers to be ranked from highest to lowest.
    After the pools you then go on to the knockout stage, which is known as the direct elimination or DE. The opponents you get in the DE are determined by your ranking, so the top seed will meet the bottom seed, the second seed will meet the second from bottom, and so on. The better you do in the pools, therefore, the further you are likely to get in the tournament.
    Unlike pool bouts, which only go to five, DE fights are always fought up to fifteen hits, spread over three periods of three minutes each, with a one minute gap in between. Whoever gets to fifteen first, or is leading at full time, wins and goes through to the next round. With each round, half of the fencers still in the competition are eliminated: sixty-four, thirty- two, sixteen, eight, four, right down to the two who meet in the final.
    It ’s a good way to run it, although you do occasionally get upsets when somebody has a nightmare in the opening round and goes through to the DE underseeded.
    When they ’ve done the rankings they print them off and stick them up on the wall somewhere, usually in the corridor outside the main hall, and you always get a huge press of fencers crowding around the list to see how they’ve got on. A few minutes after this they put up the tableau, which is a diagram showing who is fencing who in the DE, so you can see all the people you are likely to have to fence on your way to the final, assuming you get that far. That morning it all made for interesting reading.
    The crush had died down a bit by the time Sue and I had made it down from the cafeteria, and we could both clearly see how I had done. As expected, the top of the list was dominated by the usual names, some of the best epee swordsmen in the country having, as expected, taken a clean sweep of five straight wins. After that came those with four victories which, on this occasion, included Toby Rutherford. He had done well for himself, his four wins and healthy indicator giving him a seeding of 11 th overall, which meant his first round fight was going to be the number 54 seed, who was a relative novice. This was good for Toby, as it looked very likely that he was going to make it through to the last 32 with ease.
    My three victories, with a fairly healthy indicator, had put me into the DE seeded 22 nd overall, and I was going to be up against the number 43 seed, a gobby bloke from the RAF called Hartson who I had known for a few years. He was fast enough but never really did much with it, and I knew I could beat him.
    What I was most pleased about, though, was what happened in the second round of the DE. If it all went according to the seeding, I would be crossing swords with Toby