Andrew Fischl
Appearances
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spoke volumes to me. It may well have been important to her. That's completely fair. But this is not something that anyone would be reasonable in saying they prepared for their entire life.
Pablo Torre Finds Out
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Yes, that's correct. So shortly after that happened, I was contacted by someone in, we'll just say, the French Olympic Integrity Committee. They said they had seen the show and some of the other things that I had released about the corruption.
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They both seem very silly to me. As a high-level fencing coach, I can safely say that I have never, ever told one of my female fencers not to fence a male fencer because it was dangerous. We encourage little kids to fence with... high-level fencers all the time. And I would think that… Wait, like literal children? Yes.
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I would think that like a small child fencing against an adult would be more quote-unquote dangerous than that. But fencing is one of the safest sports that there is. And everyone has something to gain in practice regardless of who the opponent is.
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And asked if I was worried that that would happen in Paris as well.
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The week before this competition, she knowingly participated in a mixed competition, which means that men and women are both allowed to sign up. That tournament was extremely casual. There were no points on the line, not a qualifier for anything, just a fun tournament. But she fenced several men in that competition, and she actually did beat some of them.
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I told them I was very worried that that would happen, and they basically asked me to fill out a form for the French government designating me a whistleblower in France, and then also had me highlight pretty much instructions for how I thought that that kind of subversion could happen at the Olympics, and my suggestions for how to prevent it from happening, and...
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So as far as the skill level goes, men may have physical advantages over women. How that translates into the sport is up for debate. I think at the top level, there is a significant difference. But at that level, I don't know how much there is. And so much of fencing is about distance, tactics, timing, precision, that just pure strength is not such a gigantic advantage in the sport.
Pablo Torre Finds Out
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It's not meaningless, but it's not a gigantic advantage. And she did beat several male opponents the week before.
Pablo Torre Finds Out
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Fenced literal men, yeah. Without an issue for safety and beating some of them. So obviously the skill factor wasn't an issue either.
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So the punishment was a black card, which is disqualification and a short probationary period afterwards for refusing to fence an eligible opponent. In fencing, we do not get to pick our opponents. And if we did, it would obviously be ridiculous.
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If I refuse to fence you at a competition, then I would be black carded for the same, like in exactly the same manner. I would receive the same probationary period. It's not about trans, black, white, Asian, religious, whatever. It's I am supposed to fence an opponent who's eligible. And by refusing to do that, I am going to be disqualified.
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they basically implemented a system that was watching for those things and tried to prevent them from happening. Which is to say, Andrew Fishel, good to have you back in studio. Yeah. Out of everything that's gone on, even if I never accomplish anything else again in the sport, which I hope doesn't happen, but even if it does, it's nice to know that because of the efforts that we have put forth,
Pablo Torre Finds Out
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So I think that's pretty silly as well. There have been, to my knowledge, no examples of people in fencing who were bad and then transitioned and suddenly became good. And this is a process that, as I understand, takes a long time to complete. You need to have an appointment with a doctor to diagnose you with gender dysphoria syndrome and then
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You need to be on hormones for at least a year, demonstrating consistent tests below a certain testosterone level. And it's not like if I declared myself a woman, I could just compete in a competition, a women's competition tomorrow.
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It took a while. She told me that in high school, she was having thoughts of transitioning for a while. And when she finally took it seriously enough to go see a doctor, it took, I think, a year to get that appointment.
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She was put on hormones for over a year before she was allowed to compete in the women's category.
Pablo Torre Finds Out
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I also have a few other stories about this. A friend of mine coaches high school in New Jersey, and she has coached trans athletes before. And there was a trans athlete on her team who was doing okay on the men's foil team, wanted to transition, was told, like, we don't have a spot for you on the women's team right now, so you would just be basically a benchwarmer.
Pablo Torre Finds Out
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And that person chose to be a female benchwarmer rather than to continue to start as a male because... That's just who this person was. And that was very important to her.
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This scheme. Can I read a tweet that I was sent on this topic that's pretty funny?
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Okay. Thank God. So I don't remember who said this because I just have a screenshot of the actual text, but...
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It says, how many men who dream of being top-tier professional athletes are willing to take female hormones, lose their muscle mass, lose their athletic edge, feminize their appearance, and live their lives as a woman in order to beat girls in a sport that pays less, has fewer sponsors, has a much diminished public profile? How many boys are willing to do this to play softball, volleyball, etc.?
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And even if you are successful, you're ostracized for it.
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Those games were a little bit fairer, and that's something that people worked their whole life towards. So I felt just an amazing sense of relief that someone was actually taking that seriously enough to act on it.
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It seems that their new subtle proposal for what the rules should be is you just can't do that anymore.
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They're dealing with kind of pressure from two different directions. One is the government telling them that they have to change the policy or they'll lose their NGB status. But the other is, I don't think that they're allowed to be less inclusive than the parent organizations or they would lose the NGB status anyway. So it's like being caught between a rock and a hard place here.
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But essentially we have to do what our parent and grandparent organizations are doing in terms of inclusivity rules. Right. And as of right now, the USOPC and the IOC both allow the inclusion of transgender athletes under the eligibility criteria that we've talked about already.
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My personal feeling is that the Secretary of Education and a few others might have some use for a little bit more education on this issue.
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No, I don't. Based on what I've seen from her in the past in confirmation hearings and in meetings she's held, she doesn't seem to be interested in getting to the bottom of this. And I do think that there are legitimate questions and concerns on this topic, but I don't think that someone like Marjorie Taylor Greene is interested in finding out anything like that.
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What the f*** is up with this buzzer? Right. So in... This is not a new story. It's something that happened a long time ago. But in 1976, in the pentathlon category of the Summer Olympic Games, a Soviet fencer named Boris Onishchenko actually had...
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engineered a device inside of his epee where when he pressed a button, it would activate his scoring mechanism, which is to say that when he pressed a button, he essentially gave himself a point. So what he was doing was he was lunging near his opponent and then pressing the button to make it look like he got a point.
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In the case of Boris Onoshenko, this situation actually led to a new rule about... where the wires are placed inside the guard. And over time, there have been other rules that have changed the way that equipment works to prevent tampering.
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And the most recent instance of that that I'm aware of is in 2020, body cord casings were made transparent because of a situation that was never officially resolved one way or the other. But there was a fencer who... many fencers were complaining when they hit her, their point would not register. And when they tested afterwards, everything seemed fine.
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Which is to say that fencing never lacks for creative problems.
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I think I heard at one point that something like half of the rules about equipment were because someone found a way to cheat with them at some point. Right.
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So this fencer's name is Lucia Luccherini. She was accused of having this happen in the years between 2015 and 2018 when she was doing well. And a common, like, retort to that is people who are doing well have opponents who object to them doing well. But there were videos being passed around of her with dozens of clips in them of her getting hit cleanly and the machine not registering a point.
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How was she getting away with this? How did this scheme allegedly operate? there was a person who was working with her who had a machine that was operated by either pressing a button or a switch, and when the switch was active, it would prevent her machine from registering touches scored on her.
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And so hypothetically, if I was helping you in this way, I would have the machine active while you were fencing, and as soon as you were scored on and it blocked it, I would just deactivate the machine, and when someone tested on you, it would just work normally.
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She ended up winning the Italian Championships, I believe, in 2018. And when this happened, there was a match earlier in the day that a person refereeing her thought a lot of strange things were happening. So during the semifinal of that tournament, this referee actually sat behind the father and recorded over his shoulder what he was doing while watching his daughter fence.
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So essentially in this clip, the fencer on the left hits the fencer on the right, and you can kind of see the blade hitting target cleanly. But then if you look at the same point from the side, her dad is doing something in his pocket, which is a little bit awkward. There's no clapping or cheering. It's very graphic, the motion he's making.
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It's very odd. And again, nothing was conclusively proven, but enough people thought this was weird that a referee who was in charge of one of her matches earlier did this. At the end of that competition, they actually confiscated all the equipment of all the top four fencers to examine it. But... They did it after the medal ceremony, so about 10 minutes after.
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And during that period of time, that equipment was not watched over or attended.
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So when that happened, the Italian Federation said that the proof was inconclusive. They couldn't figure it out. But a self-proclaimed expert wrote an email to International Fencing and had about 20 different people who were high ranking in the FIE at the time. detailing a bunch of matches that this fencer was involved with and situations that this person felt were anomalies, as he called them.
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And he evaluated them on three criteria. One, that the anomalies occurred almost exclusively with this fencer on the strip. Two, they were pretty much almost all in benefit of this one particular fencer.
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And three, and I think this is the most compelling point of all, when this fencer was not present on the strip, all scoring apparatus worked pretty much normally for every other match of that day, of that tournament. It's just when she was present, she seemed to have a lot of anomalies going in her favor. And when she wasn't present, everything seemed fine.
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She did send me something, but she also said that she did not want me to make any sort of comment on it at all. Understood. She didn't want to have to comment on this on the record. And I can understand that this was a stressful time for her, but I feel that it's very important to, when something like this happens, to make people aware of it.
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So that, one, anyone who's considering doing something hypothetically similar in the future would think twice about it. And also just so that people are aware that this is going on. Because this person is still competing. Right. And as far as I'm aware... There haven't been any anomalies since then, but this did happen. It wasn't acknowledged at all, and this person is still active in the sport.
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I have been sent dozens of examples of this in the past couple weeks. I mean, I would say, uh,
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Yeah, it's always confusing to me that people are willing to even consider doing something like that when you... I want to beat people because I'm better than them. I don't want to beat people because I'm, like, sneaking coins under the table in a board game or I'm manipulating the equipment or... have some deal with a referee or something. I just want to prove that I'm better than other people.
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And I just don't understand. I don't know. It's confusing to me. You sound, Andrew, like such a woke lib. Yeah, maybe.
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Yeah. Even this specific topic of something that happened in the preliminary round of an irrelevant tournament that just was between two fencers who had almost no chance to win. Right. The whole thing. It's very silly.
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I did an interview with one of the fencers in the clip a few weeks ago, and at the time, there I think were 15 Fox News stories about this.
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Mm-hmm. So at the beginning of this match, right before the referee told them to start, the fencer on the right, Stephanie Turner, got down on one knee and protested the inclusion of her trans opponent, Red Sullivan, in this event. The referee came up to her and told her that it would be a black card if she refused to fence on the grounds of just refusing to fence an eligible opponent.
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She said that she knew that, but that she was a woman, her opponent was a man, and that she wasn't going to fence that person. So the referee left, presumably to confirm that penalty with bout committee. When he came back, he had, I suppose, confirmed that that was the correct penalty to issue and gave Turner a black card for refusing defense.
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Meaning exclusion from the tournament.
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He sent that to the CEO of USA Fencing, Phil Andrews. He claimed that USA fencing was in violation of President Trump's executive order keeping men out of women's sports.
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It would be nice if it actually appeared as if they wanted to learn something from this investigation.
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So just how hard was it to reach Red Sullivan? It took me like 10 minutes from when I heard this story to make the connection.
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So not exactly the investigative odyssey. No, not at all. I saw that this was happening, or several people had messaged me that this was happening. I got sent a meme on Instagram, and it had, I think, a couple million views, thousands of comments. So I reached out through my network and was able to get her number extremely quickly.
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We've heard a lot in the news about this incident and what Stephanie, when we've heard Stephanie's side of the story, can you talk us through what happened from your perspective?
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There's a spectrum of ratings from A being the best to E being the worst, and then one unrated below that. And Red is a D-rated fencer, which is fine. Like, it shows a basic level of technique and understanding, but it isn't anything extremely impressive. Sorry. Well, how does Red feel about that scouting report of... I think she would probably find that fairly accurate.
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She's also a D-rated fencer. I had never heard of her before this. And in looking at her results, they're also fairly mediocre. Like, I would put the two of them at approximately the same level. Which is to say that when it comes to the tournament that we are... Making this mountain out of... It was a deeply unserious, unimportant tournament. Well, now you sound like an a**hole.
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I mean, you need a certain amount of points to qualify for Summer National Championships. And this is one of the last tournaments that allows you to do that. So if you are fencing at this tournament with the goal of accumulating those points, it means you either didn't do well at the others or... just didn't want to go to them.
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And at that point, I think it's fair to say that it's just not that important.
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In order to qualify for tournaments that you need to go to to even qualify for the Olympics, so like qualifiers for the qualifiers, you need to have at minimum a C rating. And she does not have that, so it... I don't know her. I've never spoken to her. I've tried to reach out to her, but it seems from the outside, like this is just a casual fencer doing these tournaments for fun.
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No, definitely not. And anyone who says that doesn't know anything about athletics.