taly’s triumphant Olympic fencers are using their fighting skills to stay in the limelight and promote their sport now that interest has waned after the Beijing Games.

The fencing team drew wide attention after it brought home two individual gold, two individual bronze and three team bronze medals.

The swashbucklers have used media appearances at home to great effect, knowing that soon the focus will return to more traditionally popular sports like soccer and auto racing.

Diego Confalonieri, who won bronze in the team épée, wants to avoid the fate of most smaller Olympic sports that must wait until the 2012 Games in London for another 15 minutes of fame.

“In Italy fencing is still not a famous sport because we lack a structure,” Confalonieri said. “There are very few fencing gymnasiums, so we hope the medals we are winning can help fencing to have more centers. We could be a lot more than we are, but there are a few of us and we are still very competitive.”

Fencing may have returned to the back of the Italian sports papers, but at least it still makes the news here. In most countries, it will be forgotten by the mainstream news media for the next four years.

“If you haven’t done fencing, it is difficult for you to understand how it works,” said Igor Celli, a teacher at the Piccolo Teatro fencing club in Milan. “That’s why it is difficult for fencing to get media coverage.”

The sport traces its roots in the country to the 1500s, when Italians began using the rapier extensively, developing a fencing technique and using the weapon for dueling.

Italian fencing masters like Camillo Agrippa, who invented the four fencing positions, and Giacomo DiGrassi and Vigiani, who invented the lunge, flourished during this time.

“Fencing is a sport which has long roots in Italy,” Confalonieri said. “It is because of historical reasons, it could be the medieval link.”

The Olympic medals have helped increase participation at fencing centers, but this is unlikely to endure over time.

“People see the fencing at the Olympics on TV, and they want to join clubs,” Celli said. “There is a pattern: an explosion after the Olympics, then down for the next three years, then it rises again. The next big jump will be after the Olympics in London.”

Even if more Italians have become interested in the sport, there are few facilities. Resources are stretched.

“Milan has more than one million inhabitants, and there are only four clubs,” said Marco Mandelli, another fencing teacher at Piccolo Teatro. “It’s not as if there is space for everybody.”

The Italian fencing federation president, Giorgio Scarso, said many sports clubs used old facilities.

“There are new facilities cropping up in smaller towns,” he said, adding that a new fencing center was being built in Rome and that there were plans for another in Milan.

“The delicate problem at the moment is finance,” Scarso said. “Of course it is worrying, but it does not worry me so much for the 2012 Olympics. The real drama will be 2016 and 2020. The fear I have is for the long-term future of sports like ours.”

Scarso said he did not expect the global financial crisis to hamper the sport immediately.

“The repercussions will hit the big federations because of sponsorship,” he said. “Sponsors invest where there is huge visibility.” Problems with state handouts for sports like fencing could come further down the line, he added.

Italy’s fencers have basked in the Beijing glow so much that Matteo Tagliariol, the épée gold medalist, went on a reality show, Maria Valentina Vezzali, the gold medalist in foil fencing, attracted headlines for an appearance on a political program when she made a personal remark to Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi that was interpreted by the news media as flirtatious.

Vezzali’s brush with Berlusconi led her employers, the Italian police, to bar her from her next media appearance.

She had been scheduled to go on Italy’s “Saturday Night Live” dressed in yellow like Uma Thurman in Quentin Tarantino’s “Kill Bill” movies.

Margherita Granbassi, who finished third behind Vezzali in Beijing, was also blocked but decided to leave her job with the police to work on the political television program “Annozero.”

“I am leaving to avoid an embarrassing situation for me and the police,” Granbassi told reporters. “It has not been an easy choice and I am not happy at having taken this route. When I finish my career as a fencer, I would like to be a journalist.”

Confalonieri expressed support for Vezzali and Granbassi.

“I’m an athlete like them, so I am on their side,” he said. “They should do whatever they feel is right. We can go on television and express our sporting, political and social opinions. We are athletes, but also people. The publicity is good for fencing. It is a positive thing.”

Celli said more needed to be done to boost fencing’s profile.

“Nearly all fencing centers are underground, below street level,” he said. “This is our reality. The only way to get out from beneath the stairs is to get people together at local fairs, sports days. The classic advert in the newspaper just doesn’t work.”

source:nytimes.com