Fencing is a niche but fundamental sport in the Olympics, contested at every Summer Games since 1896. Yet despite its genteel reputation and simple objective — touch an opponent with your blade before being touched — the sport has long been rife with drama and suspicion.

Two months before the Paris Olympics, international saber fencing is engulfed by questions about the integrity of refereeing, accusations of preferential treatment, and concerns among top athletes and coaches that their sport’s tangled connections may be helping decide who gets to compete at the Games.

The federation that governs fencing in the United States, USA Fencing, recently suspended two international referees after they acknowledged communicating with each other during an Olympic qualifying tournament in California. It grew so concerned about two other referees that it asked the sport’s global governing body to ensure that those two judges were no longer assigned to any matches involving Americans.

And just last week, more than a half-dozen elite fencers demanded harsher punishments and urgent action to protect a sport that they say is “vulnerable to unfair refereeing and match-fixing.”

Judgment Calls

While fencing relies on electronic scoring, it is referees who parse the complicated rules of attack during each match and decide if a point, or touch, is valid. Those rules bring an element of subjectivity to the scoring, and saber fencing, one of the sport’s three disciplines along with épée and foil, can be particularly challenging because its athletes lunge explosively at one another and deliver touches nearly simultaneously.

Subjectivity “creates a lot of room for corruption,” which can be difficult to prove, said Yury Gelman, a longtime fencing coach at St. John’s University in New York who will coach his seventh Olympics at the Paris Games. In an interview, Gelman expressed frustration that little was being done to address saber fencing’s problems.

The referees who were suspended last month by USA Fencing, Jacobo Morales and Brandon Romo, have been barred from judging matches in tournaments overseen by the federation for nine months. They denied any manipulation of the match. An investigation into their conduct began after they appeared to have communicated during a match in January involving a top U.S. saber fencer, Tatiana Nazlymov, 19, at an Olympic qualifying tournament.

USA Fencing had initially sought 10-year bans for both men but ultimately decided on lesser punishments after a disciplinary panel report, reviewed by The New York Times, found “the appearance of impropriety” but no credible evidence to support collusion or other manipulation.

They were not the only referees, though, who had drawn the attention of the U.S. federation. Months earlier, Phil Andrews, the CEO of USA Fencing, had written with alarm to the sport’s global governing body, the International Fencing Federation, to express concern that there was “likely to be improper officiating” of bouts involving Nazlymov and another leading U.S. saber fencer, Mitchell Saron.

In its letter, which was sent Dec. 3 and reviewed by the Times, USA Fencing said it was primarily concerned with two referees, Vasil Milenchev of Bulgaria and Yevgeniy Dyaokokin of Kazakhstan. Video evidence, the letter said, indicated that calls made by those referees in bouts involving Saron and Nazlymov showed “a likely favoritism” toward them.

As a result, USA Fencing requested that Milenchev and Dyaokokin no longer be assigned to bouts involving any U.S. fencers. Andrews said he understood that the International Fencing Federation responded to the letter with an investigation but was unaware of its outcome.

The international federation did not respond to requests for comment, but both referees continue to judge matches involving U.S. fencers. Attempts to reach Milenchev and Dyaokokin through the international federation were unsuccessful.

In a second letter written by USA Fencing that was sent to Nazlymov and Saron on Dec. 18 and also reviewed by the Times, Andrews told the athletes that the federation was aware that “potential preferential officiating treatment” was benefiting their performances in international competitions, and warned them that they could be stripped of some points they had accumulated toward Olympic qualification if “strong evidence” of match manipulation emerged.

Nazlymov and Saron have since been named to the U.S. team for the Paris Olympics. And by March, USA Fencing’s concerns seemed to have eased. Saron acknowledged through a spokesperson that on March 6 he had received a text message, which was reviewed by the Times, from a federation official saying that he was not a cause for concern.

A Web of Connections

The latest flashpoint came in early January, when Nazlymov was involved in the match at the North American Cup in San Jose, California.

According to a USA Fencing disciplinary panel, with the score tied at 12-12, Romo began to seek input from Morales before awarding points to either fencer, and Morales acknowledged responding via hand gestures. Such communication is a violation of fencing’s rules.

Howard Jacobs, a California lawyer who represented Morales, the more experienced referee, said his client was simply affirming calls that the less-experienced Romo planned to make, and that no decisions were changed because of their communications. According to the report, Romo said he was seeking only confirmation of his intended calls.

A video posted online that showed Morales signaling also showed Nazlymov’s coach sitting near and talking to Morales at some point during the match. Neither referee disputed the video, USA Fencing said.

According to testimony at a hearing, the coach, Fikrat Valiyev, asked Morales who Romo was and another question unrelated to the bout, but the two did not discuss any calls, Jacobs said. Nazlymov narrowly won the match, 15-14.

Andrews said that there was “no evidence that Tatiana herself is at fault” in the refereeing dispute.

Valiyev has not been accused of any impropriety and said in an email that he had never tried to manipulate matches. But he has come under scrutiny in other videos posted online for possible conflicts of interest by coaching and refereeing at the same competition, and by refereeing matches involving Uzbek fencers while Vladimir Nazlymov was coaching Uzbekistan’s national team or individual Uzbek athletes.

Valiyev, responding by email with Vitali Nazlymov, said that he behaved according to the rules. But the two coaches acknowledged that “fencing is a small world and conflicts exist everywhere.”