The winning hits of the Ukrainian national fencing team, from the Dnipro to the Arno

Mykolayiv, the river city halfway between Kherson and Odessa, was – still is – an obsessive target of Russian bombers. Last August, together with two journalist friends, Slava Kolomiichuk and Nello Scavo, I met a Paralympic swordsman, Oleg Naumenko, 37, and his young dog Bayr. Oleg was displaced in 2014 from Donetsk to Mykolayiv, and entered a local fencing school capable of putting to good use his desire for friendship and his athletic talent. Oleg had become a prominent member of the Ukrainian national fencing team, especially in foil. When I met him, he had just made another name for himself by inventing a kind of trench periscope. The invention was linked to the height of Oleg, who at the age of twenty had lost the use of his legs due to an accident at work, and has been moving around in a wheelchair ever since. That handcrafted periscope, up to three meters high, allows him to be a shooting observer from the cover of the trench with his wheelchair. Furthermore, Oleg and two of his associates had tried their hand at manufacturing ballistic mirrors and solar panels for trenches: they printed everything in 3D, recovered unexploded and prohibited mines from the ground, scattered by Russian artillery to work with delayed blast, disassembled them and reassembled them under their light homemade drones, and sent them back to where they came from.

He had come to Pisa several times with his national fencing team, he said: Pisa is among the most illustrious centers in the history of Italian fencing. At the time I boasted to Oleg of my friendship with Soriano Ceccanti, who is now 70 years old, champion of the best pisanity and also, a generation earlier, in his wheelchair, Olympic and world fencing champion. From last Thursday to Sunday, one of the stages of the World Fencing Championship took place in Pisa, in which they participated 500 athletes with teams from 30 countries, including the Ukrainian national team, although in the last year he hadn’t had time to train, let’s say so. I attended the last day of the championship together with Soriano and Oleg, who in the meantime had made friends. They discussed thrusts and the attitude to adopt in the match, attacks and defences, offenses and counter-offenses, as in times of peace, when loyalty is the rule.

Very good things happen every now and then. Insperate, I was about to say, but in reality I had hoped for it. The Ukrainian team, mixed of women and men, from Kyiv, Kharkiv, Mykolayiv and other regions, which the organizers of Pisascherma had exempted from the entry fee, was housed in a hotel in San Giuliano, just beyond the Pisan Cus sports facilities. They got to see the things that need to be seen, in the Piazza dei Miracoli and in the rest. Also the Lungarno was more beautiful, and the Arno, which seemed to him very narrow compared to the Dnipro and the Bug of Mykolayiv.

(The tournament finished with China in first place, Ukraine in second, Italy in third. In October, Italy will host the final part of the World Fencing Championship, in Terni. Who knows if in times of war or peace, and for whom).