Ukrainian Fencing Federation

What it is

The Ukrainian Fencing Federation is a public organisation created in 1992 holding national status — authorised by the State with the exclusive right to represent Ukrainian fencing at official international competition. Its president is the lawyer Mykhailo Illiashev, a member of the European Fencing Confederation's legal commission and of Ukraine's National Olympic Committee.^[1] [2]

Membership is a documented, fee-bearing, registered status: the federation publishes a current member register, a membership application form and an annual fee page. It states that more than 160 Ukrainian fencers compete in about 100 international tournaments a year, and that it runs over 40 competitions across children's, cadet, junior, senior and veteran categories. It publishes audited financial reports.^[1]

How the national team is selected

This is the most fully documented selection instrument on the site, and its most striking feature is who signs it.

The annual selection system is a jointly approved State and federation document, not an internal rule. It is approved by the Deputy Minister of Youth and Sport under a qualified electronic signature with a printed certificate serial, agreed by the federation president under seal, and signed also by the ministry's summer-Olympic-sports department head and the national team's head coach. Its provisions are stated to be mandatory.^[3]

The mechanism is a published ranking, not discretion. The principal criterion is the fencer's personal ranking, which the federation calculates and publishes on its website within 48 hours of each ranking competition. Points are the product of place-points and the competition's coefficient; rankings run separately for cadets, juniors, under-23 and seniors; points are awarded only to fencers reaching the direct-elimination tableau, and never for team results.^[3]

The quotas are numeric:

• Individual championships — ranking positions 1-3, plus one fencer by decision of the coaching council. Cadets take positions 1-4.
• World Cups and Grands Prix, seniors — positions 1-8 plus four on the senior coach's proposal.
• Team events — three fencers drawn from the individual competitors, plus one by coaching-council decision.

The size of the delegation is fixed jointly by the federation and the ministry; fencers who do not follow the ministry-approved training calendar may be excluded from state-funded delegations; and organisers of ranking events must deposit competition protocols with the federation within 24 hours. Those protocols are the evidentiary substrate for both selection and the conferral of sporting ranks.^[3]