FIE Fencing Womens Foil Data

Context

The International Fencing Federation (FIE) is recognized by the International Olympic Committee (IOC) as the world governing body of fencing, as such is charged with establishing the rules and implementation for international competition. It also maintains a website where it posts many international tournament results for sport fencing over the years. In addition, it has fencer bio pages for each athlete which stores biographical data.

Within a fencing tournament, there are two phases: pools and direct elimination. During pools, fencers are split into groups of 5-7 and fence a round robin (each person fences every other person in their pool) of short bouts to 5 points. The results from these pools are then tabulated to form a ranking going into the direct elimination round (DEs), where fencers face off in an elimination bracket and fencer longer matches to 15 points.

Strategies for pools and DEs vary and as such results from one cannot be directly applied to the other. However of the two, pools generates a larger amount of data (21 bouts versus 6 for 7 fencers).

You can read more about the raw data collection here and the initial data cleaning here.

Content

The data contains pool results from almost 50,000 bouts from 218 tournaments in Women's Foil from January 2014 to May 2021. Alongside this is biographical data and historical rankings data for the 2,108 fencers appearing in these bouts.

Inspiration

Some possible questions that could be explored with this data are:

• What factors predicts wins? When one or both fencers are rated (i.e. have points), how good a predictor are these ratings? If neither fencer is rated, what are the key contributors to predicting a winner?
• How common are upsets? Are some fencer's more prone to winning upsets than losing them? Are some fencers less likely to upsets overall?
• What impact does fencing in one's home country have on performance? What about time zone differences?
• Do fencers perform 'differently' (needs to be formulated first) against fencers from the same country than competitors from other countries?
• How do fencers with rankings in multiple weapons compare with those that are only ranked in foil? What about those that are only ranked in non-foil weapons?