Fencing is one of the oldest sports in Olympic history. It’s also one of the least watched domestically. Phil Andrews, CEO of USA Fencing, is on a mission to change that, and with the 2028 Los Angeles Games on the horizon, he’s running out of time. In a masterclass in scrappy brand building, he shares how he’s building a sports brand with almost no budget and no marketing playbook, cold-calling CMOs, crashing Comic-Con, and convincing Snoop Dogg and Flavor Flav to pick up a sword.
This is an abridged transcript of an interview from Rapid Response, hosted by the former editor-in-chief of Fast Company Bob Safian. From the team behind the Masters of Scale podcast, Rapid Response features candid conversations with today’s top business leaders navigating real-time challenges. Subscribe to Rapid Response wherever you get your podcasts to ensure you never miss an episode.
In the lead-up to the 2028 Olympics in LA, you’ve been advocating for sports like fencing that get less attention, even though it’s growing, as you say, to band together. You pulled together five sports into what you call the United Sports Collective. That’s fencing, squash, cycling, sailing, and rowing. This sort of collaboration doesn’t generally happen, as I understand it?
No. Historically, national governing bodies, and to give a very brief explanation, an organization called the International Olympic Committee, or the IOC, owns and operates the Olympic Games, and there’s the IPC for the Paralympic Games. Underneath that, you’ve got an international federation that manages each sport around the world, and they mainly write the rules and hold world championships. Then each sport has an organization — in this case, U.S.A. Fencing — that runs the sport domestically. Historically, national governing bodies, or NGBs, haven’t really worked together very closely. So when we founded the USC, and we’ve now added lacrosse to that group, the idea was to collaborate more, particularly around commercial partnerships. That’s how we started it, but it’s actually turned into a bit of a best-practices unit where we have very similar demographics across those national governing bodies, and we face relatively similar problems.
So you work together to raise money, and you’re also sharing information about what’s working for you.
Absolutely. Of course, we’re still doing that individually as U.S.A. Fencing, as U.S. Rowing and as U.S.A. Cycling, but it’s a great place for us to be able to exchange ideas and leads. Especially when you think about the commercial landscape, when you think about, “I need to target X demographic,” you don’t think, “I want to target a rower or a squash player or a lacrosse player or a fencer.” You think, “I want to target the demographic that works for my business.” So more often than not, there’s an opportunity where we can be stronger together across those different national governing bodies. Similarly, we can exchange what’s working in rowing and what’s working in fencing, and sometimes those won’t be the same thing. Sometimes it’s good information that makes you think, “Oh, wait, that’s a great idea. I can adapt that for what I’m doing in rowing or what I’m doing in cycling or what I’m doing in lacrosse,” for example.
As I understand it, you used to run U.S.A. Weightlifting.
I did.
You didn’t do this there. U.S.A. Weightlifting is not one of these programs that’s part of this. So for the sports that are part of this grouping, what are the similar challenges they have? What are the similar demographics?
If you think about rowing, fencing, sailing, and perhaps squash and lacrosse as well, we’re all national organizations, but we have a focus on the Northeast. We’re strongest in New York City, Boston, DC and Philadelphia, and that’s common across those organizations. They’re also NCAA-focused, collegiate-focused organizations. To talk about U.S.A. Weightlifting, it was a wonderful experience spending 10 years in that sport, and I love that community, but it’s very different from fencing, both in the way that we’re set up geographically and, frankly, in the affluence and demographics of the sport. We’ve got a lot more in common as U.S.A. Fencing with U.S. Rowing than we necessarily do with U.S.A. Weightlifting, which may also have more in common with U.S.A. Boxing or U.S.A. Judo than it has with us.
Hollywood may be a prime cultural center for swordplay. How does that help or impact your marketing efforts? Are you actively cultivating that? Do you want fencing to have its F1 moment?
We are using every tool that we can in this wonderful window we have, where there’s heightened interest in the Olympic and Paralympic Games ahead of a home U.S. Games. Particularly now following the World Cup, I think that excitement’s only increased. We’ve got a database we put together of over 600 people who have wielded a blade in a film, and you see an interesting number of fencers actually come into the creative industries who were legitimate high school or college fencers. So people like Jerry O’Connell, Angelina Jolie and Greta Gerwig were actually fencers as kids, who went through our system and then went on to be, of course, who they are today.
And there’s actually a duel in Star Wars where it briefly goes from being what we know as lightsaber, that typical sort of very broad movement, to being actual épée. And that’s because Bob Anderson, who was an Olympian in fencing, a British Olympian, was the main person behind Pirates of the Caribbean, Star Wars and so on. He and a colleague of his, Nick Gillard, essentially invented lightsaber from a combination of sabre and épée. I think it’s in Revenge of the Sith — I might be incorrect in saying that — but they actually change it to épée briefly between Ewan McGregor and Hayden Christensen. And you’re right, we’re leaning into that. We have ambassadors, people like Mandy Patinkin, of course famous for Inigo Montoya in The Princess Bride, all the way through to people like Orlando Bloom, who of course played Will Turner in Pirates of the Caribbean.
Yeah, and when there’s a cultural phenomenon like K-pop demon hunters who use swords, does that inspire kids to say, “I want to be a fencer”?
It does.
As you look ahead to the 2028 Olympics, what would a successful Games look like for you, for USA Fencing?
The first is the obvious one: the field of play. We want to do well. We want to win. We’ve got a great team. We’re defending Olympic champions, defending world champions, and so that’s exciting. On the business side, we ranked sixth for earned media out of the sports in Paris, up from 12th in Tokyo. A lot of that came through relationship building. It came through building relationships with people who can bring eyeballs to us. So the first sport that Snoop Dogg tried at the Games was fencing, and we had a large part in making that happen. Flavor Flav fenced, and part of that was he wanted tickets to foil. So we said, “Great. You now need to fence Lawrence Scruggs.” To my surprise, he said, “Great. I’m in.” So he did. A lot of people saw fencing, as well as our building traditional media relationships with NBC, ABC, CNN and so on. The biggest opportunity that lies before us is this unique excitement for sport in the next 10 years in the United States, but particularly around the Los Angeles Games for us. We want to see medals, sure.
Then we want to see those medals and those experiences translate into people going, “Wow, that’s inspired me, and this is a sport that speaks to me, and I want to go and try it.” The big catchphrase for the London 2012 Games was inspiring a generation. It doesn’t happen by accident. You’ve got to be deliberate about it, and that is our job. LA28 is not going to do it for us. They’re going to be part of it. The U.S. Olympic and Paralympic Committee is not going to do it for us. NBC isn’t going to do it for us. It’s our job, USA Fencing, to go out and make sure we inspire the next generation of fencers for the United States.