Over the last Olympic quad, I tracked 6,943 touches across 325 bouts at the international level, coding every single action for who was pushing, who was pulling, how touches were scored, and what the tactical context looked like. It was the kind of obsessive, frame-by-frame study that only an epee fencer would find romantic.
Now, with the FIE’s September 1, 2026 rule change eliminating the P-Yellow card from the passivity sequence, every data point I collected just became a lot more urgent. Let me explain why.
The Current Rule (and What’s Changing)
Under the current passivity framework, the penalty escalation has three steps. Starting September 1, 2026, the P-Yellow goes away entirely. One fewer warning. One fewer chance to recalibrate.
Current Rule
Effective September 1, 2026
That compression changes the math of the bout in a way that overwhelmingly rewards the fencer who can push — and punishes the one who can’t.
What the Data Tells Us About Pushing and Pulling
Let’s start with the headline number: in our dataset, when one fencer is pushing and the other is pulling, the pulling fencer holds the lead in 60.4% of all touches. That’s not a typo. Nearly two out of every three competitive actions take place with the retreating fencer ahead on the scoreboard.
This makes intuitive sense to anyone who’s watched elite epee. You score a touch, you take the lead, and then the geometry of the bout shifts. The trailing fencer has to come forward. The leading fencer can sit back, control distance, and pick off attacks. Epee rewards the defender, and the defender is usually pulling.
The Pull Advantage is Real (and It’s Steep)
When the pulling fencer has the lead, they score on the next touch 54.2% of the time. The pushing fencer — the one chasing the deficit — scores only 26.2% of the time. The remaining ~20% are double touches where both fencers land.
And it gets worse as the deficit grows:
The Attack in Preparation: The Pull’s Secret Weapon
There’s another dimension to this push/pull dynamic that the top-line scoring numbers don’t capture: the attack in preparation. When the pushing fencer commits forward, they expose themselves to a timing action that is devastatingly effective in the hands of the pulling fencer.
In my dataset, the pushing fencer was caught in preparation 894 times, compared to 664 times for the pulling fencer. That’s a 34.6% gap. The fencer who has to come forward is inherently more vulnerable to being timed during their advance.
But here’s the number that should concern every coach preparing for the late 2026 rule change: when the pulling fencer already holds the lead and executes an attack into the pusher’s preparation, they succeed at a rate of 73.6%. Nearly three out of four times, the leading puller who times an AIP converts it into a touch.
This is the crux of the problem for the trailing fencer under the new rules. The push requires closing distance, which creates preparation opportunities. The pulling fencer reads the preparation, times the attack, and at a 73.6% success rate, further widens the gap. Of the 682 times a trailing pushing fencer was caught in prep while chasing a deficit, each one represents a moment where the push — the only path to recovery — was turned into an even deeper hole.
Under the current rules, a trailing fencer who gets caught in prep still has the P-Yellow buffer to regroup. Under the future rules, that catch might be the difference between a P-Red that’s survivable and a P-Black that ends the bout.
Why the Push Game Becomes Non-Negotiable
Here’s what the data is really telling us as we approach September 1, 2026: if you can’t push effectively, you cannot recover from a deficit.
The pushing fencer’s primary weapon is the attack, and the numbers show it. When pushing fencers score, 64.4% of their touches come via attack. Only 35.6% come via defense. Compare that to the pulling fencer, who scores 52.4% of their touches defensively through counterattacks and parry-ripostes, with only 47.6% coming from attacks.
The push game is inherently an attacking game. And the counterattack is the pulling fencer’s best friend — pulling fencers won 622 counterattack touches compared to 432 for pushers. The pulling fencer doesn’t have to create — they react. And when the leading puller times an AIP at 73.6% success, the pushing fencer is caught in a brutal bind: they must attack to close the deficit, but every attack risks being timed and widening it.
Under the compressed P-card timeline, the trailing fencer will have approximately one fewer minute to execute a push before the score changes involuntarily. That means every push attack needs to be higher quality. There’s less margin to probe, set up the action, and wait for the right moment.
What This Means for Training
Push Attack Quality Over Quantity
The data shows the lunge (57.3% success) and the flèche (55.7% success) are both viable on the push, but the single-light hit rate on the push is only 43.0%. That means too many push attacks are resulting in doubles or misses. Sharpening accuracy on the push — especially to the advanced targets — has to be a priority.
Drill the Attack in Prep — Both Sides
With the pulling fencer’s AIP converting at 73.6% when they hold the lead, pushers need to learn how to disguise their preparation. Coaches should drill scenarios where the pushing fencer advances under the pressure of a lead deficit while varying tempo and distance to make preparation harder to read. Equally, train your athletes to execute the AIP from the pull — it may be the single most efficient scoring action in modern epee.
Train Recovery from Deficit Specifically
When trailing fencers do score on the push, their most successful tools are the lunge (309 touches), the flèche (173), the remise (160), and the parry-riposte (156). That parry-riposte number is telling — it means the best pushers aren’t just blindly charging forward. They’re pushing with enough tactical awareness to draw and finish.
Understand That the First Touch Matters Even More Now
With one fewer P-card in the sequence, the fencer who scores first gains an even more durable structural advantage. My data shows that in 34.5% of bouts, the lead never changed hands at all. Under the new rules, that percentage is likely to increase. Whoever touches first controls the geometry of the bout for longer, with fewer rule-based mechanisms to disrupt their lead. With one less P-Card to work with, the fencer with the higher initial seed should always begin on the pull, and tactically operate as if they start with the lead, even at 0-0.
Footwork, Footwork, Footwork
More than ever, training calculated entrance into the opponent’s distance on the push is the difference between a convincing attack and getting murdered by attack in prep. Train your half advances and economical footwork to cheat distance, convince your opponent you have a right to enter, and even sucker them into your own distance.
The Bottom Line
The FIE’s upcoming rule change is designed to reduce passivity in epee, and it will likely succeed at that narrow goal. But the second-order effect is more significant: it amplifies the advantage of the leading fencer and compresses the window for the trailing fencer to recover.
In a sport where the pulling fencer already holds the lead in 60% of competitive actions, already scores at twice the rate of the pusher when ahead, and already turns the attack in preparation into a 73.6% conversion weapon — removing one step from the penalty escalation makes the push game not just important, but existential.
Train the push. The data is clear.
