The "Flick" attack should be continued as a valid touch

Thanks Pro.RebuttalsR1. SafetyT3h factsThe facts are in on this, and unfortunately for Con, they aren’t looking good for him. A review commissioned by F.I.E. which reviewed 9 studies on the causes of injuries in fencing found that virtually all injuries occur in foil fencing by only torso, arm, wrist and leg injuries.[http://fie.org...]They noted that other sports such as soccer and basketball incur injury of 50 and 31 times respectively more than fencing does. All nine studies found less than 4.4% of fencing injuries were head-related injuries (which would consequently include any and all flick-injuries to the head), and fiver out of nine studies found absolutely no evidence of head injuries incurring whatsoever.That is not to say that flicking poses no risk to injuries in fencing – except that even if they did, then they would not be remotely of a significance enough to warrant prohibiting, since they:1.Do not constitute an exaggerated source of injury2.If it does constitute an exaggerated source of injury, then eliminating it would do virtually nothing to reduce the injury level in fencing (at most 4.4%, and most certainly much lower than that still) which is already massively (31-50x) lower than other socially acceptable mainstream sports.Note that eight out of nine of these studies were performed before 2005, i.e. before the electronic timings were changed and hence flicking became much less popular – thus it is easily concluded that flicking would have an increasingly negligible effect if any on safety today.T3h theoryFurthermore, the rear torso is currently legitimate target area in foil (if you hit someone in the back in foil, then you are eligible to score a point), and Pro’s point here is indiscriminate between types of head-injury risking attacks. I argue that any attack aimed at someone’s back is also liable to hit that someone’s back of the head (a great example of this is on the run-through of a fleche move, where after parrying, the defending foiling is permitted to make an attack on the passed opponent, who is virtually guaranteed to have their back turned on their opponent.There are other circumstances where this is applicable too, such as when an opponent is ducking etc., and all of there run the same risks of hitting the head while intentionally targeting the valid target area of the back.Thus I establish a counter proposal:Invalidate the sensitive portion of the back as target areaThis would be simply accomplished by redesigning fencing lames (similarly to how sabre lames are already designed with below the torso), and hence solve all these theorietical issues simultaneously. This proposal would be infinitely more sensible than universally and arbitrarily invalidating and entire repertoire.Furthermore, flicks can attack any area, for example in a right vs left handed fencer, the flick can be used to more effectively hit the torso, with absolutely no risk of hitting the back of the head. Ergo Pro’s arguments do not work for other classes of flicks.R2. Flicks surrender the right of wayThis is not an argument for invalidating flicks – this is not an argument at all. Since all attacks that lose/surrender right of way are still valid touches in fencing. For example if somebody makes an attack with a bent arm, they surrender right of way, however if they land on target and their opponent misses (which is very common at all levels of fencing), then those attacks will still score. Pro’s argument would be to invalidate each and every attack outside of right of way (which from experience is a lot of them). A common tactic in fencing is to hit your opponent with a counter attack in such a manner which would cause your opponent to “time-out” even though they have right of way. We would be destroying an entire way-of-fencing by invalidating attacks they do not have right-of-way, which would seriously cut the level of variety, and ironically make it even more of a game of “electronic tag” as Pro objects to. Valentina Vezzali is probably the most successful fencer of all-time, and one of the most successful olympic athletes of all-time with six gold medals spanning five separate olympic games - yet her fencing style is predominantly all about surrendering the right of way in an effort to defeat her opponent with brute timing.[https://en.wikipedia.org...] Pro would be turning the game of fencing completely upside down (I can’t imagine the uproar this would cause between fencers and the F.I.E. - they would get lynched!) with his proposal here, and hence needs to be discarded.R3. The Flick is “Out of Time”.This, exactly like C2, is not an argument against invalidating the flick as a touch. At best it is only an argument for flicks to not have right-of-way. These are not remotely synonymous. If I make a flick attack, and my opponent has right of way and does not land his hit, then my flick will still be valid regardless.R4. The Nuts and Bolts of a FlickFencing is long since divorced from its ideological origins – and I see no argument for why we ought to strive to maintain ideologies. All sports are dictated by equipment, and fencing is no different. There was no such thing as electronic scoring in traditional times, yet there is virtually no contest that fencing ought to go back to the classical purely judged style of fencing. With it all the consequences of electronic fencing were accepted. If foil fencing was anything like its ancestry would dictate, then virtually every fencer would be dead – since no fencer using “sharps” would survive the suicidal counter-attacks that are frequently made today (which now score favourably for the counter-attacker due to electronic time-out. Nor would people be remotely as willing to be aggressive as they are in foil and sabre today.The fencing sport of epee is frequently chastised within the fencing community for being slow-paced, boring to watch, boring to referee – yet epee is probably the closest to how fencing was traditionally done in early years. It was so bad that F.I.E. was forced to recently change the rulings on non-combativity, in an effort to make the sport more watchable. Nobody wants to watch people bouncing around for 3 minutes, afraid to attack the other “traditionally” while risking being hit with traditional and easy defences.[http://www.fencing.net...]Fencing is not today, and very dubiously was in the past, about the “point-in-line”, fencing is far too rich and complex to be rendered that simplistic. Even if we completely eliminated flicking – foil fencing would still be nothing like its ancestry as Con wishes it to be.R5. Anecdote“That *h*t hurts when you do it wrong.”So does any fencing move. I am sure Con has suffered the displeasure of a novice fletching (a running attack) at him with his full-body weight with a brand new foil such that it doesn’t bend and hence the full 10+stone of person is focussed on a single narrow spot. THAT sh*t hurts! Yet do we see fencers calling to see the fleche banned? No.This is ironic since fleches actually have the potential to cause fatalities (usually via. a blade snapping and hence a sharp edge being prone to run an opponent through), wheras a flick is dubiously so. Only sevn fatalities have been recorded since 1937, and six of them were as a result of broken blades. [http://www.exra.org...]Fencing hurts when it is done wrong yet, yet this is something that fencers accept when they get on the piste, and a study on “sources of pain” in fencing would yield virtually identical results to the aforementioned study on fencing injuries – flicks are a very minor source of “pain inductions” in fencing – and pure theory is not enough to establish otherwise.