Enzo Lefort is a very modern musketeer
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Enzo Lefort lives on the unglamorous eastern edge of Paris, a short bike ride from the photo studio where we meet. He’s scarfing a hurried breakfast of mini-croissant. You might notice the handsome 32-year-old if you passed him on the street, but assume he’s just an ordinary Parisian.
It’s the fate of champions of minor sports, who get attention only during the Olympics. This summer, the fencer will stride onto the stage at Paris’s Grand Palais to compete for an Olympic gold in what should be the climax of his career – or at least the sporting bit of it, because few athletes have more hinterland than Lefort.
He discovered fencing as a five-year-old growing up in the French Caribbean territory of Guadeloupe. He was watching the Atlanta Olympics on TV in 1996. “I saw Laura Flessel-Colovic, a champion fencer from Guadeloupe, winning gold. Then I played with swords, and when you’re five that gets you excited.”
Relatively poor Guadeloupe has a rich fencing tradition. Lefort is due to make a documentary about it. “It’s the heritage of slavery. The slaves didn’t have the right to use weapons, so they invented a weapon made from a tree, called the mayolè. They reappropriated their own bodies. Since the 2000s, 30 per cent of French national teams have consisted of Guadeloupians and Martiniquais [Martinique is another French Caribbean territory]. I’m part of a generation where six of us ‘outremarins’, overseas French citizens, have won Olympic medals in fencing, all of us born between 1988 and 1991. We’ve been in the French team together for about 10 years.”
Meanwhile, metropolitan France has its own fencing tradition dating back to the reign of Louis XIV. “The French nobility would settle its differences in duels,” chuckles Lefort. As an adolescent, he flew to France for competitions. But his parents struggled to afford plane tickets, and he wanted them to save for his studies. Just when he was about to quit fencing, he was invited to join a junior training centre in the Parisian suburbs. How did he handle moving 6,750km alone aged 16? “Very well,” he laughs. “It was harder for my parents.”
He picked up the mainland’s customs. Now, he says, “when I’m in Paris, I have a very Parisian way of life. I go to cafés, I cycle, I take the metro. But when I go back to Guadeloupe, I don’t dress or eat the same way, and I only go about by car. I’m proud to say that these two cultures are inside me.”
In 2012, his first year competing with adults, Lefort was selected for the London Olympics. He paraded in the opening ceremony behind France’s flag-bearer, his childhood hero, Flessel-Colovic. “Afterwards I go back to the Olympic village. I go into the first toilets I find. There, I turn my head, and the guy who walks past is Novak Djokovic. It’s the sort of thing I’d 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 it well,” France’s coach Emeric Clos remarked wryly. Still, Lefort eventually rebounded, winning the individual world championship 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.” The first time, he recalls, “I had the impression of living outside my body from the moment I made my last touch. My teammates carried me off in triumph, I went on the podium, I did the media, I was at doping control. It all passed hyper-quickly.
“Three years later, I won by one touch, 15-14, which is fairly mad. But very quickly I came down, and I went off alone for five minutes and managed to fix these moments inside me, 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 as a kid on weekends and bought my plane tickets. I managed to remember everything that had brought me to that precise moment. People were trying to hurry me, saying, ‘You’re needed.’ I said, ‘Well, they can’t do the podium without me, so I’ve got time.’”
There are no signs of his triumphs in his flat in Paris. “My medals are in a shoebox in a cupboard. I have a wife, a five-year-old daughter, and in their eyes I’m not a fencer. My home isn’t a temple dedicated to my fencing results.”
What did he learn from London, Rio and Tokyo about how to handle 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 it’s not a big event. Others will be motivated precisely by its importance, and are carried away by the emotion. In my first Games I was in the wonder of discovery. After that, I detached myself a lot and was really there ‘just for the competition’.
“My stress diminishes the closer I get to the match. Once I’m in action I’m not stressed any more, and all the adrenaline in my body is directed at one goal: winning the game. Adrenaline helps me to do things faster, stronger, longer, better. It helps me be even better than I am in training. You need adrenaline to be a champion. The way our profession is organised, it’s a tableau of domination. You win your match, you live. You lose, you die. There’s something primary and bestial in that. I adore it.”
But fencers cannot fill their lives with fencing – an amateur sport that attracts few sponsors. At some events, almost the only spectators are fellow competitors. And so, Lefort has constructed a bewildering array of other lives: he’s a photographer with three published books, a podcaster, author of a manga comic book and a qualified physiotherapist. “If I had listened to people, I would only have done fencing,” he says. “But other things interest me. When you do sport, you have limitless ambition, because you want to be the best in the world. Many athletes may not have that ambition in other domains; many have a bit of imposter syndrome. They tell themselves they’re not really in their place.” Lefort tries to extend his ambition beyond sport.
He’s now also an Olympic “ambassador” for Louis Vuitton. The luxury conglomerate has increasingly partnered with athletes 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 musician, producer and Louis Vuitton men’s creative director Pharrell Williams. “The first défilé I did, there was a one-hour concert where he brought together all his environment of music and art, with [rappers] Jay-Z and Tyler, the Creator. I find that really inspiring.”
Now Lefort is preparing for what could be his final Olympics, in front of his watching family. He marvels: “I live just 5km or 6km from the Grand Palais” – the exhibition hall from 1900 that will host the fencing events. He photographed the palace’s renovations, and befriended the architect. But when he returns for the Games, the surroundings won’t matter. “There will only be a piste, an opponent, a coach.”
Grooming, Tomoko Ohama at Wise & Talented using Oribe. Photographer’s assistant, Matheus Agudelo. Production, Mickaël Bardi
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