Lightsaber Dueling Registered as Official Sport in France (theguardian.com)

It's now easier than ever in France to act out Star Wars fantasies. The country's fencing federation has officially recognized lightsaber dueling as a competitive sport, granting the weapon from George Lucas's space saga the same status as the foil, epee and sabre, the traditional blades used at the Olympics. From a report: Of course, the LED-lit, rigid polycarbonate replicas can't slice an opponent in half. But they look and sound remarkably like the blades that Yoda and other characters wield in the blockbuster movies. The physicality of lightsaber combat is part of the reason why the French Fencing Federation is now equipping fencing clubs with lightsabers and training would-be lightsaber instructors. Like virtuous Jedi knights, the federation sees itself as combatting a Dark Side: the sedentary habits of 21st-century life.

"With young people today, it's a real public health issue. They don't do any sport and only exercise with their thumbs," says Serge Aubailly, the federation's secretary general. "That is why we are trying to create a bond between our discipline and modern technologies, so participating in a sport feels natural." In the past, Zorro, Robin Hood and The Three Musketeers helped lure new practitioners to fencing. Now, Luke Skywalker, Obi-Wan Kenobi and Darth Vader are joining them. "Cape-and-sword movies have always had a big impact on our federation and its growth," Aubailly says. "Lightsaber films have the same impact. Young people want to give it a try."

Comments

I wonder...

[BringsApples]

...what percentage of French people are happy, or even care, about this. Or is this just another of the strange things that get to happen in today's world?

Who knows. But here's a list of other odd sports that exist.

Re:I wonder...

[jellomizer]

Traditional Fencing is an expensive sport to learn. There is a lot of safety equipment that needs to be tailored to you, and a well balanced and crafted saber or foil isn't cheap too. Especially compared to a $20 football (choose your brand of foot ball) and an other $100 worth of safety equipment

Light Saber with these toy Sabers, are actually much safer, and you don't need such a high barrier to entry to the sport.

With all the thing in the world, Sports with a well regulated and organized way to beating the crap out of other people is probably what we need anyways.

Re:I wonder...

[Jason Levine]

I made "lightsabers" for my boys for $1 each. Get some inexpensive pool noodles, shiny silver duct tape, and black tape (electrical tape works well). Cut the pool noodle in half. Wrap silver duct tape around one end to make a "handle." Add the black tape to make decorative fixtures like "buttons." Now, you can battle and whack each other with your lightsabers without hurting each other. Depending on the length of the pool noodle, each one might make two sabers - or only one with some bits left over. These stand up for about a year or two of my boys hitting them against each other quite hard so they're quite long lived for the cost - and easily replaced. (Also, you can make them in different colors to suit your Jedi or Sith preferences.)

wedgie

[PopeRatzo]

The longer I live, the more I understand why nerds get bullied.

Re:wedgie

[lgw]

It's no more nerdy than foil fencing, just less old. It's also about as abstracted from reality as foil fencing.

Any exercise program that you actually do is a good one. If light sabers motivate people, more power to them.

Re:wedgie

[Ogive17]

It's sad that people are being ridiculed for doing something that brings joy and has no negative impact on anyone else.

Re:wedgie

[Solandri]

The modern foil fencing saber is a bastardized form of the original saber, altered to be more foil-like to increase the excitement from lightning-quick thrusts and parries. The original saber is meant to be twirled. When you make a sweeping cut with a straight sword, you lose all the energy you put into the blow if it misses the target. But because you twirl a saber, the rotational energy you put into it builds up and is retained until you hit something. That's why it's so prominently curved - when you twirl it most of your hits are going to slicing blows, and curving the blade allows you to make slices with less chance of getting the blade stuck (contact is along a shorter length of the edge). Same reason cavalry sabers were curved - so they wouldn't get stuck and ripped out of your hand while you struck a blow from horseback.

In that respect, the light saber duels in the movies with their "fancy" twirling and spinning is actually somewhat historically accurate to its namesake (more so than the fencing saber). And if people want to want to do this type of sparring using fake light sabers instead of traditional curved sabers, then all the ore power to them. (Presumably they're not curved because they can slice through anything so can't get stuck.)

Re:wedgie

[wwphx]

I prefer "Everybody is someone else's weirdo." I pride myself on being able to fulfill that role for many people simultaneously.

Épée

[DontBeAMoran]

We don't go around calling your cities "Nouveau York" or "Laveington/Laverton".

It's spelled "épée" not "epee".

Kendo? They invented Kendo?

[OzPeter]

Seriously .. it looks like Kendo .. https://youtu.be/n7XfOA7Ly6U

No harm in it

[Ogive17]

If it gets more people interested in these "combat" sports, why not? Those that really enjoy the sport might eventually switch to one of the more traditional weapons. This could bring a big boost to the national program for France.

Kendo The Japanses sport

[ardmhacha]

The Japanese sport of Kendo https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... using a bamboo sword called a shinai https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... is very close to lightsaber fighting.

It's no weirder than real fencing

[cascadingstylesheet]

It's really no weirder than a sport based on obsolete weaponry (used in a way that that nobody gets hurt with).

In today's world, light sabers are not especially more fictional that swords, as far as everyday life goes.

Well... Less likely to get hurt?

[foxalopex]

It seems like fun unless you get nailed in the wrong place. Thou I wonder if plastic stick dueling (which is more accurate) would take the fun out of it.

Re:Registered?

[tepples]

I guess the penalty of competing in an unrecognized discipline of fencing was ineligibility for recognition of your club's activity by your country's governing body of fencing.

Re:Registered?

[K. S. Kyosuke]

Nothing, you're out of balls by then. Or maybe they take your shaft?

Buckshot!

[Zorro]

You are NOT deflecting all 9 pellets of 00 Buckshot with a lightsaber!.

Fencing has a problem

[Harvey Manfrenjenson]

I've said this before (and promptly got yelled at in the comments), but I'll say it again:

The problem with Western fencing is that it just isn't much fun to watch. This is true even if you've done some fencing yourself, and can sort-of follow what is going on. In recent years, the Olympic bouts haven't even been televised.

The main issue is that the action is over in about two seconds. The other issue is that you usually can't follow what happened in those two seconds. Quite often it appears that both fencers have scored a hit, and the question of who gets a point comes down to the judge's interpretation of arcane "right-of-way" rules.

This is just wrong. Swordfighting is supposed to be fun to watch! How on earth do you take a swordfight and turn it into something duller than a golf tournament? Western fencing rules, that's how.

It's time they developed some variant forms of fencing. To begin with, get rid of the idea that the action should grind to a halt whenever anyone scores a valid touch-- and get rid of the idea that anything which happens a half-second after the touch "doesn't count". Boxing doesn't work that way. MMA doesn't work that way. Neither does real swordfighting, I would imagine.

While you're at it, why does everything have to take place on a fencing strip, where your only options for movement are "forward" and "back"? What is this, a side-scroller video game?

(Of course, on a serious note, I recognize that traditional Western fencing has its devoted followers, and I'm not suggesting that it should be abandoned. But variant forms can, and should, exist along the traditional forms.)