At 21, Rodney Wilkinson was the best fencer in South Africa: national champion in foil and sabre, second in epee. He had toured Europe and Argentina. He had not stood on the Olympic podium, because South Africa was banned. The apartheid state had taken that from him, along with everything else it took from everyone.
One evening in August 1971, Wilkinson stood in the gym at the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg, foil in hand. He was facing his coach Vincent Bonfil, a 25-year-old Englishman who had represented Britain as a reserve at the 1968 Mexico Olympics, and who was now in Johannesburg finishing a master’s thesis in metallurgy. They were working on a technique in which both fencers lunge simultaneously, and the one who reads the other’s move a split second earlier wins the point. They came at each other. Wilkinson’s foil caught the edge of Bonfil’s sleeve. There was a pop.
