Enzo Lefort lives in the unglamorous eastern end of Paris, a short bike ride from the photo studio where we meet. He is tucking into a hasty breakfast of mini-croissants. You might notice the handsome 32-year-old if you pass him on the street, but assume he is just an ordinary Parisian.
It is the fate of champions of minor sports, who receive attention only during the Olympic GamesThis summer, the fencer will take to the stage at the Grand Palais in Paris to compete for Olympic gold in what should be the climax of his career, or at least of his sporting side, because few athletes have more ground than Lefort.
She discovered fencing at the age of five, while growing up in Guadeloupe, a French Caribbean territory. She was watching the Atlanta Olympics on television in 1996. “I saw Laura Flessel-Colovic, a Guadeloupe fencing champion, win gold. Then I played with swords, and when you are five years old that excites you.”
Relatively poor Guadeloupe has a rich fencing tradition. Lefort plans to make a documentary about it. “It is the legacy of slavery. Slaves did not have the right to use weapons, so they invented a weapon made from a tree, called a mayolè. They re-appropriated their own bodies. Since the 2000s, 30 percent of the French national teams have been made up of Guadeloupeans and Martinicans.” [Martinique is another French Caribbean territory]I am part of a generation in which there are six of us…ultramarines“We are French citizens overseas and have won Olympic medals in fencing, all born between 1988 and 1991. We have been together in the French team for about 10 years.”
Meanwhile, metropolitan France has its own fencing tradition that dates back to the reign of Louis XIV. “The French nobility settled their differences in duels,” laughs Lefort. As a teenager, he flew to France to take part in competitions, but his parents couldn’t afford the plane tickets and he wanted them to save up for his studies. Just as he was about to give up fencing, he was invited to join a youth training centre in the Parisian suburbs. How did he manage to travel 6,750 kilometres alone at the age of 16? “Very well,” he laughs. “It was harder for my parents.”
He adopted the customs of the continent. Now, he says, “when I am in Paris, I have a very Parisian lifestyle. I go to the cafés, I ride my bike, I take the metro. But when I go back to Guadeloupe, I don’t dress or eat the same way and I only travel by car. I am proud to say that these two cultures are within me.”
In 2012, his first year competing with adults, Lefort was selected for the London Olympics. He marched in the opening ceremony behind France’s flag bearer, his childhood hero Flessel-Colovic. “Afterwards I went back to the Olympic village. I went into the first toilets I found. There, I turned my head and the guy who walked past was Novak Djokovic. It’s the kind of thing I never expected to experience.” The French fencers failed in London, but at the next Olympics, Rio 2016, Lefort won team silver. “He took the time to celebrate well,” said France’s coach. Emerico closure However, Lefort eventually bounced back and won individual world championships in 2019 and 2022, and a team gold at the Tokyo Games.
He says he feels lucky to have won the world title twice, because, the second time, “I knew what it was like.” The first time, he recalls, “I felt like I was living outside my body from the moment I made my last touch. My teammates carried me out triumphantly, I got on the podium, I spoke to the media, I was in the anti-doping control. Everything happened hyper fast.”
“Three years later, I won by one touch, 15-14, which is pretty crazy. But I recovered very quickly, went away for five minutes alone and managed to fix those moments inside myself, to realise what I had done. I could never have done it without all the coaches who accompanied me, without my parents who took me to fencing when I was a kid on the weekends and bought my plane tickets. I managed to remember everything that had led me to that very moment. People were trying to rush me, saying, ‘They need you. ’ I told them, ‘Well, they can’t get on the podium without me, so I have time. ’”
There is no trace of his triumphs in his Paris apartment. “My medals are in a shoe box in a cupboard. I have a wife, a five-year-old daughter and, in their eyes, I am not a fencer. My house is not a temple dedicated to my results as a fencer.”
What did you learn from London, Rio and Tokyo about how to approach an Olympics? “I don’t think there’s a secret method. Some people need to desecrate the fact that it’s the Olympics. They need to think that it’s not a big event. Others will be motivated precisely by its importance and get carried away by the excitement. At my first Games I was in the wonder of discovery. After that, I let go a lot and was really there ‘just for the competition.’”
“My stress decreases the closer I get to the match. Once I’m in action, I’m no longer stressed and all the adrenaline in my body is directed towards one goal: winning the match. Adrenaline helps me do things faster, stronger, longer, better. It helps me be even better than in training. You need adrenaline to be a champion. The way our profession is set up is a domination grid. You win the match and you survive. You lose and you die. There’s something primal and beastly about that. I love it.”
But fencers cannot fill their lives with fencing, an amateur sport that attracts few sponsors. At some events, almost the only spectators are the competitors. Lefort Lefort has built a bewildering array of other lives: he is a photographer and has published three books, a podcaster, a manga comic author and a qualified physical therapist. “If I had listened to people, I would have only fenced,” he says. “But I am interested in other things. When you play sport, you have limitless ambition, because you want to be the best in the world. Many athletes may not have that ambition in other areas; many suffer a bit from impostor syndrome. They tell themselves they are not really in their place.”
He is now also an Olympic “ambassador” for Louis VuittonThe luxury conglomerate has increasingly associated itself with sportsmen since the famous photograph of football rivals Lionel Messi and Cristiano Ronaldo playing chess on top of Vuitton luggage in 2022. Lefort was a model in the AW24 menswear show designed by the musician, producer and Pharrell Williams, creative director of Louis Vuitton men’s collection. “The first defile I did, there was a one-hour concert where he gathered his entire music and art environment, with [rappers] Jay-Z and Tyler, the Creator. I find that very inspiring.”
Now Lefort is preparing for what could be his last Olympics, in front of his family. He marvels: “I live only 5 or 6 km from the Grand Palais,” the 1900 exhibition hall that will host the fencing events. He has photographed the palace’s renovations and befriended the architect. But when he returns for the Games, the setting won’t matter. “There will be just one track, one opponent, one coach.”
Hairstyling, Tomoko Ohama of Wise & Talented with Oribe. Photography assistant, Matheus Agudelo. Production, Mickaël Bardi