James-Andrew Davis, the 2014 European Champion, has officially retired from competition.
Based in the USA for a number of years, he spoke to BF just after returning from the USA Nationals where he was coaching athletes from the Massialas Foundation, known as Mteam. He spoke to BF in July.
You’re calling time on your career as an athlete. Tell us when you made that decision?
This actually goes back three years, the last Olympic cycle, really. We had had our team with Richard Kruse, Marcus Mepstead, myself, and then we’d had others, sort of jumping in and jumping out. I’d come back from an injury in 2016 after the Olympics, and it had been a hard cycle for me to get back into. You know, after having surgery, I was getting just back-to-back injuries. So that four year cycle was becoming very, very tough, and we were pushing.
We were in contention, and we went all the way to the end. It got to the World Championships in 2019 where it became very difficult if you don’t make the quarterfinals the next day, the event, team event, where it’s two and a half points, it’s very hard to keep up with your competitors. So we didn’t do well. We came back for the next season. We realised mathematically we could still make it with the next two events, but we had to do very well. That, unfortunately, didn’t happen in Paris, and pulled out of the team event. Richard did, and Marcus did as well. And we decided, okay, we’ll fight to the end of the season, and obviously we’ll be fighting for an individual spot.
For me, that didn’t happen. Marcus got the spot. I’d given it everything, it wasn’t to be, very frustratung, but so be it. So season’s over, then COVID happened. It was fortunate because it sort of highlighted what my future is going to be without fencing.
I was coaching at the club. We were doing a lot of video analysis, which is what sort of helped me into what I’m doing now with the kids. But I wasn’t fencing. The Olympics was very hard to watch, but I watched some of it anyway, and I just had this ‘ if I quit now, I feel like I’ve missed something’. I felt I had more I could do.
So, you know, speaking with Marcus we both decided, yeah, look, we want to give it one last go. We want to leave no stone unturned. And really pushed Richard and who’d now definitely retired, ended up in a great way of being sort of the coach, national coach of the team, which was quite good. So I decided I’ll give it three more years because obviously, the Olympics had been pushed back to 2021 so that was also another big factor – it was only a three year commitment, not four. And yeah, I decided that day, like this is what we’re going to do, we’re going to go for it. So I committed to it, got back in shape, got back into training hard again, with my with my club mates in Massialas, and just went from there. Unfortunately, more injuries were a big factor. That’s just part of sports, part of getting older.
I think I was half a point behind Kristjan Archer, my teammate, we’d been fighting all the way through the season of who would then go to zonal. Unfortunately, he won out that battle, and I lost to my club mate, Alexander, who I’ve trained with for the last 10 years, so to end it with him, you know, brought it full circle. And it was a great battle. Of course, I wanted to qualify. Of course, I wanted to win the Olympics, but now I have a very different feeling in 2024 than I did in 2020 and can say: Yep, I’m happy to move on. I feel like I’ve done everything that I could have that was in my ability.
What are you up to at the moment?
I’m working for Massialas Foundation. I’ve been working for them for almost 10 years now. I moved to San Francisco in 2013 to train with them, so I stayed with them. Every year you have summer nationals, the biggest event, I think, in the world for fencing.
With our summer nationals in Columbus, Ohio, this year it was a great year for M team. We took ten medals: three golds, and one silver. And then it was six top eight medals in the US, they give a medal for the top eight. Great, great season. This year was the biggest event ever. Just junior men’s foil was 420 something entries. Of course, if you were to go and look at epee. I’m sure epee is even bigger.
Sport in America is a major part of getting into colleges, so parents really, really support it from a young age. You get both the healthy side of that and the unhealthy side of that, unfortunately, which just comes with the sport, comes to the territory, but it means we end up with massive numbers, you know. And kids really push on to 18, which means you’re going to get a lot of kids staying in the sport beyond that as well, which is really good. I think we all want to see more universities getting involved, which would be great.
The unhealthy side of it is that you don’t always get the kids that want to do the sport. It’s most of the kids you can find at the height at the top schools, they play a musical instrument, speak a second language, and they play a sport at a very high level. So you have that sort of trade off where, I think then a lot of parents will push their child, not because it’s the child’s best interest, that they have a passion for the sport, but because it’s another thing to pick off and say, you know, here’s my son or daughter, they effectively meet the requirements or exceed the requirements for what you’re looking for university admission.
You want to stand out amongst the rest of the crowd. But they all have great scores. They’re all at the top level of their sport. It makes it harder for for the schools to then pick, but it also allows, you know, fencing to grow and grow and grow, because there’s another opportunity. It’s good and bad, you know, it’s great for the sport, because you’re just getting such big numbers, and when you’ve got big numbers, you can pick your best fencers for an event. And that’s not to say that a lot of the kids still enjoy themselves, and some people will learn to grow and enjoy the sport, and some kids inevitably will never love the sport. You know, that’s just the way it’s going to be, unfortunately.
So how are you transitioning out of competition? What’s changed for you?
I’ve had time to think about it. I put a lot of thought into, what is it I want to do, where do I want to go. I’m fortunate, I’m married, you know, got a beautiful wife, and we’re very happy out here together. And so it’s, I feel like I very much have that family ties, you know, we want to have kids and these kind of things. So a lot of stuff is already like set in motion. We knew where we wanted to be and what we want to be doing over the next few years. So having that plan has allowed me to sort of be very stable, not sort of jumping around frantically being I don’t know what I want to do with my life.
Covid was, in a way, very beneficial, because obviously the club was closed, and we had to come up with a way of how we’re going to continue teaching the kids over that period. And my boss, we went through zoom, like many clubs, and we were doing a lot of video analysis with me moving to the east coast, we basically continued that on a one to one with the children, which has been a massive success. I absolutely love it. It’s, it’s been really, really enjoyable. It’s sort of allowed me to open my eyes, I mean, even a year ago, to how I was analysing video, how I’m doing it now is very different, and I’m very passionate about it.
Working with the kids you get to see the kids that are very talented, maybe just need a little bit of guidance. But then you get the kids that are very, very quiet and not confident, and maybe they do know it more than they realise they know it, but they just need a little coaxing out. And I’ve loved working with those kids as well, and you really get to draw it out of them and see them blossom. It’s been really, really fun. I have a lot of parents also sitting on the meetings. And you get some really cool questions – sort of out there, thinking about different ways of looking at it from people who don’t understand the sport so well, and so it’s just been a lot of fun.
I’ve always wanted to be a firefighter, this is a long term process. I’ve got a lot of hurdles along the way, but it’s something for me to focus on. I’m really looking forward to taking the next step. I hope I don’t leave the sport at all. That’s not my intention anytime soon. I think with enough planning, you know, you’ll get enough time off for me to be able to coach at the same time. Both from the coaching and the competitive side of fencing, I’m at the top level with everybody. I say to people, especially parents that, you know, and they’re like, oh, just get one light. I’m like, you got to understand, if you think, from like, a martial arts perspective, everyone in the hall is a black belt. And so that’s the kind of level where you’re at. And so the fire service, I’m not even a white belt, you know? I’m just applying so someone can teach me how to do this.
Tell me about your background coming into fencing
Going into Rio, myself and Richard were both from the same area, a similar area in North London, both state educated, and we had Marcus and Lawrence, both privately educated. Reality is the big reason for that is because it’s expensive from a young age, to do any sport, especially if it’s not football. It’s just not cheap. One thing I quite like about the US there are a lot of private organisations. People have set up charities and stuff, and do it themselves. You really do see a lot of a lot of clubs, especially on the East Coast. There’s quite a few where they really try to get kids in from sort of unprivileged backgrounds and get them into the sport.
I had a very standard middle class background, went to Southgate school in Enfield, lived in East Barnett, grew up there. Mum was a nurse, Dad was a physiotherapist, so they worked for a living. We certainly weren’t poor, and definitely not rich. Very, very fortunate.
I started fencing when I was four years old. That was RLF fencing club, which no longer exists now. I believe Fencers Club London, is sort of like the remnant of it. I really like what they’ve done and really built the club up, and very much taken a very professional mindset into the club base, which I think a lot of clubs throughout my life have not had. You see the same with up in Scotland as well. And that’s the great benefit of having past athletes going into coaching now, bringing in their expertise back to the grassroots level.
So I was four years old. They said no. The owner, Ralph said to my Mum: “Okay, fine, but you have to stay here with him.” I fell in love with it. My first coach was a fencing master called Bill, I don’t remember his last name. World War Two veteran, and couldn’t move. Couldn’t move– just standing there. And that was my lessons growing up for a good few years. You know, I never moved [laughs]. I stood there with my French grip, my pommel, and doing steam fencing. Steam fencing, no electric box. The club had one electric box that was for the older kids. And so I grew up learning about all the side judges and the referee, and you put your hand up when you saw the hit, and you’d abstain or say where it hit. Really cool, really fascinating.
I moved to Finchley Foils when I was 10, 11, years old and that’s where I met Ziemek. That’s sort of where it really took off, working with Ziemek for many years. My parents weren’t wealthy, but Ziemek never charged us for lessons. We paid the club fee but I used to then go every Thursday, every Saturday, and Sunday, we would go training near Holloway Road. I trained with Richard Kruse from a very young age, obviously, for the same club, and he was getting ready for the Olympics and stuff like that. And I was just like, you know, 14, 15, 16 years old getting to train with the best that Britain had.
I was fascinated, I was very determined, had a great attitude, and was just fixated on fencing, and very lucky to have had great coaches in my career. Ziemek has been a major part of that throughout and that sort of took me all the way up to me moving in 2013 to San Francisco, which Ziemek came with me for part of that, and it’s brought me to where I am now.
Was there funding available in the USA?
There was no money to come to America. I moved to learn because I was top 16 in the world. We had the Olympic pathway at the time. I had an APA that funded my flights. So for me, I was able to move at the top level. And they were able to, they did fund me. There were still hurdles along the way, but I was able to mitigate them.
Being the top fencer at the time, and top sixteen in the world allowed me to sort of push back a little bit more than the other guys were able to, yeah, but then we lost our funding in 2016 and so that was when it really got hard, very, very difficult. And that’s why I ended up taking the job in 2017 with Mteam. So I was just training there up till then.
So I had to work to fund my fencing. Otherwise, it would have been impossible. I would have been back to the UK and been working from there and trying to figure out what my next career path would be. With Marcus, it was very similar. You know, he moved much later after 2016 – he was doing sports training on the side, strength and conditioning coaching and stuff on the side to help fund his way. Kristjan is a little different because he’s got an American passport. So he already had has family here. He went to school in Notre Dame, so he had a little different access. He ended up getting a job working out here. And for him, it was a slightly different path, but still self-funded.
I know Carolina is going to Colombia University. Very good university and very good fencing. The reality is, you look at what she’s doing already, yeah, it’s only going to get better, the quality of the fencing that she gets. I look forward to watching her over the next four to eight years. I mean, especially women’s foil, she could go for four Olympic cycles if she so wanted. So I think she’s going to do very well.
Throughout my time in men’s foil there was so much bickering, so much fighting one another. You know, it was toxic, in a way. I had a lot of friends there, and I had a great time, but you just know it was there. And I’m sure it’s in every, every nation, but I look at the guys now, the young guys coming through, and it really is this genuine friendships that you see, and there’s a warmth amongst them that it’s, it really is so nice to be knowing that, I didn’t have any part in it, but just knowing that you’re leaving it in hands of people that the kids love the sport, they really get on with each other, they really support each other. It just feels genuine. And you know, I really want the best for those guys and for the girls like Carolina, who I think could be really successful as well.
On that subject, how do you think foil has changed?
It’s had lots of changes. One of the biggest ones was in 2004 when they made the timing change. Suddenly they made this big change where you really have to place your point and the tip has to be compressed for a lot longer than it used to be. So that changed the whole sport, and I was right at the cusp of my career coming through. I can’t remember how old I would have been in 2004 – 13 I think, where I’ve been learning. Just started learning, flicking everything, and then boom, everything changes. You know, you go from your lesson with Ziemek, where you just, you don’t ever hit with a point to: “Right guys, we’ve got to start just placing the point and changes it completely.” It wasn’t a massive hit to me, but noticeable enough. I remember, you know, us changing how we how we were taught, or how I was getting taught.
The next biggest one I remember is when they brought the change of the bib, which sort of really helped. The smaller fencers were able to really hide behind the bib. Once they changed that, and this suddenly became majority target, you know, you could come down and just whack people right in there, and it was the target. So it made people now have to really try to actually power instead of just sort of hide and counterattack and hope that you’d hit them off target. So that was a change, I think absolutely loved.
Then really, there’s been no physical changes. It’s been more about the way we referee in sport, which I’ve hated some of the some of the nuances that they’ve started to sort of use this awful, especially through 2016 or we had one other in 2012 which was really actually a major one, which today still we have problems with beat overpowering. So going from, you know, power past having the priority over someone beating the blade, to giving the person who’s putting most on the line, the person who’s willing to make the take the risks and go for the attack, who beats the blade should have greater priority over the person who’s trying to parry, because it’s, frankly, it’s harder to expose your target as you’re attacking them and try to hit them as it is too close up and a good chance the opponent hits you off target.
There was a change in how we identify the right of way, or who has the right of way in a specific action. A good change tends to be the referees weren’t always the issue, especially the highest level referees tended to get it right. It’s more the lower levels where that’s more of an issue. And then really the hardest one for me was to do with the preparation. This was one where we really went away from the rule of the sport of foil, which is, you know, hand before foot. You know, the hand has to be thrown at the hand threatening the target. So the point has to be threatening. Target has to be going towards the target for it to be an attack. And that sort of prevented you from just walking down the strip and then claiming that it was an attack. You learn to deal with it. You have to adapt to the rules.
In 2020, we started to have this weird sort of amalgamation of saber/foil, it was about the foot starting, not the hand starting, which I never grew up with. For me, it was always the hand starting. It’s always about whose hand started first, not whose feet started first. And this is one that I feel like refereeing is sort of going back and forth on right now. So the sport is ever changing.
For me, I wish, if I could pick one thing, I would love to have had the contact time. So the amount that the tip has to stay on the target, I would, I’d love to see that reduced ever so slightly. Not go back to what it used to be, which was kind of ridiculous. Again, it’s sort of people’s arms that could be going back and just whip it over someone’s back. The sport became almost impossible for anybody who was not in the sport to have any clue what was going on. So we don’t want to go back to that. But I think that having a slightly shorter contact time would allow people to attack, and counter attackers a lot better. Right now, I think there’s a real advantage to being very small and being able to close out and not putting great effort into making a proper closeout, as opposed to just sort of hitting and turning away. I think if we could get our point to contact less, would make the sport a little bit more fun. It’s an opinion, not a fact.
What have you noticed that people are asking for or looking for in coaching?
On a broader sort of perspective of that question is, I would say one of the issues in the US is there’s a great pressure on the kids. They do so much, and they’re pretty much like semi professional athletes in the US. I mean, this is why they’re dominating at the World Championships. One thing that I sort of struggle with a little bit is I want the kids to still enjoy it. I want it to be about the enjoyment of the sport. It’s very easy to fall into the gold medal trap. You’ve got to work harder on this. I’ve fallen into that trap so often, because being high level, I want the best, and I do believe deep down that there is a way of having top level fencing and enjoying it at the same time, because I grew up with that.
If they do truly enjoy it, and if they have all the right parts of it like, you know, they’re athletic, you know, they really understand it. They can go on to be very, very successful. If you don’t have it all, you might just enjoy it. And that’s okay. You’re not going to be the next world champion, but hey, you’re having fun with it. I want them to be enjoying it and improving.
Do you see yourself as a black athlete? How has that sort of changed your experience?
Yeah, both negatively and positively. So I’m mixed race, my mum’s black, Dad’s white, and so it wasn’t something that ever was an issue. It’s not something like especially in a sport that’s predominantly white, I would say especially in the UK, less so now than it was when when I was growing up.
I never grew up with anybody being racist to me in the UK. Never experienced that I was being cheated, because of the colour of my skin. Trust me, many times I felt I was being cheated, and it, you know, I could look back now and say it probably wasn’t, or maybe it wasn’t because of the colour of my skin. You know, that’s just, that’s sport. I did have some issues in St Petersburg, which we came to an agreement on, and I won’t go into detail on that, but you do experience things unfortunately based on the colour of your skin. It does exist. I don’t believe it exists to the extreme that people think it exists. I think if you go looking for it, you will find it. I haven’t lived my life like that.
I do, however, realise that being a young ethnic minority, I have been a role model to others coming through I know from my mum’s side, who were very, very proud to see me come through. And I hear it more from other parents who are proud of me, proud to see me doing this.
This is a story from when I was very young. My mother had obviously known nothing about the sport, about the three different weapons. When he had qualified for the Olympics, James Williams was in the local paper, and she cut him out of the paper and showed me, look at this guy. Look he’s got the same name as you, and he’s black, and it’s this role model for you to look up to, and it’s not because as a kid, you’re understanding that you look different to most people on TV and that there’s something negative or someone’s going to treat you negatively.
I’ve noticed this more and more as I’ve got older, people instinctively do it. For example, they might say to a young athlete, oh, you’re such a great athlete. You do such and such you resemble, and it’s never going to be, for example, if you’re black, you’re never going to resemble someone who looks white. They’re always going to pick the people who are black, and vice versa.
Now, many people are going to read into that in different ways. It doesn’t mean anything to me. It’s coming from a good place. Look at what you could achieve in this sport. And that’s how it always was, and that was also my first introduction to James Williams. And then I met him when I was 14 or 15 years old, where the pathway was sort of starting, and he was sort of, I want to say he’s like pathway manager. He was like the big boss and sort of running it all. And I went to Grantham camp, and I got to meet him, and boy, what an amazing guy like such charisma, just such that Mr Motivator, just unbelievable, just so much passion. And he’s one of those that like with everybody, no matter the colour of your skin, just wanted to push you to be the best. Just genuinely, such a great guy, and just such a loss to fencing yes, in general. A wonderful, wonderful man.
Tell us what you remember about London 2012
You saw a completely different London, having grown up in London and seeing how Londoners don’t talk to anybody. I remember everybody just fascinated, like, just amazed. It was so cool. And I got quite a few funny little stories from London. One of them was, like, Husayn, my teammate. We were roommates for two years, so we’d been living together for two years out in East London. We used to drive past the Olympic Stadium being built, just like, oh man. I used to have these dreams.
Once we finished competing, you know, it’s two weeks, so the first week is always fencing. It’s always in the first week. The second week, we needed a new apartment, so we spent it trying to look for housing. And you weren’t allowed to take any clothing that wasn’t our Olympic kit. We had nothing else with us, and so you’ve got these two idiots getting on the London Underground in full Olympic kit, trying to go around to get housing, just getting swarmed by people on the tube. But just bringing so much joy. Everybody was so happy. Everybody wanted pictures. So we were able to just embrace it and love it.
We found our apartment, which was out in Shadwell from Bank. So it was we had a great time living there. I remember when we got into the village, Serena and Venus Williams were both in the village on the day, and I managed to bump into both of them, and they were so sweet. starstruck. It’s so cool. Once I got to Rio, I really knew how different London was, and Rio was amazing. You know, Rio was like, I suppose every other Olympians dream of, you go to Olympics. This is what it is. London was special because it was a home Olympics, and having that, and yeah, Rio was going into. Rio was where I was fifth or sixth in the world going in. So, you know, there was a lot more pressure. I was also the number one Brit at the time. So again, all the media stuff wanted to do. And with hindsight, this is something Richard always said to me, actually growing up was like, and I had this for most of my career: I’d say Rio is sort of where maybe I fell over, fell over, a little bit, got it wrong. He always said: ‘James the media success, all this stuff that comes after, focus on your fencing. Get your fencing right. And all that stuff will come. Focus on the media stuff and you’ll just mess up.’
You know, too many people, they just want to, they want to be superstars and this kind of stuff and you trip over, effectively, what he said to those, to those words, great advice, especially for people who are not in a sport that’s particularly known. It can be quite overwhelming. I ended up doing a radio interview, and I cannot remember for who, but it’s like in the middle of training, and it gets told you, hey, it’ll only be 20 minutes. Go do this. What’s 20 minutes not training? It’s 20 minutes you’ve lost your focus, and it’s just these are little things that no one sort of truly warns you for, if I could go back, I would, I would change those kind of things.
Unfortunately, it’s just it’s the other side of it, the other part of sport at the top level. I was the top athlete for British fencing at the time. I was number one in Britain. I was the highest rank internationally. There was a lot of media presence of the people coming that wanted to interview me, and either interviews were sometimes so negative that you could feel the person interviewing you just didn’t care, they had a narrative already planned. The conversation I remember with one guy was so it was just so freaking toxic. It was just constantly going on about my weight, constantly going on about I don’t remember, but I can’t remember off the top of my head. I’d have to find it. But it was everything was sort of like half truth to what I was saying was sort of being taken out, and then he would fill in the blank with what he wanted. And it was just like, oh, this is, this is what Richard talks about when he said, you know, don’t waste your time on it.
How would you sum up what you’ve done in fencing so far?
I’ve had an amazing career, but it really hasn’t been solely mine. You know, I’ve got to the top because of my ability in the sport, for sure. But without great coaching, without my parents from day one, you know, my dad, you know, driving up the M1 back and forth, after work and so on. Peter’s Barwell’s dad would drive to Germany, and my dad would be the navigator, we would drive, you know, seven, eight hours, you know, through France to Germany to do tournaments, come back on a Sunday night for school. I think a lot of people will have those stories of their parents that commit everything. Whatever sacrifices that we make, your parents are making even more sacrifices.
I’ve been very fortunate with my coaches. Speaking about weight loss earlier, I worked with some great guys and girls very much supported me. And then coming out to America, you know, working with Dean Hinton, with Greg Massialas, with my friend, and now who I’m helping out in Boston, just I’ve made great friends along the way, and I’ve had so much support.
I don’t believe that there’s an athlete in any sport at the top level who has done it off their own back. They’ve done it with a huge amount of people behind them, supporting them. And I know I can’t sit here today and thank everybody, but those of you who know me well will know I’m very grateful for what they’ve done, and I appreciate everything that they’ve done for me, so I want to say thank you to them. ⚔️