Lewis Hamilton spent his Saturday night ringside at a fencing match in Los Angeles, which sounds like a setup until you remember who his best friend is. Miles Chamley-Watson, the 2013 world foil champion and the first African-American man to ever win a fencing world title, has spent the past year building a startup league called Fencing Club International, and the inaugural event sold out the Peacock Theater on November 22. Hamilton was there to watch.
He was not, it turns out, watching his guy win. Team Shield, captained by Hong Kong Olympic bronze medallist Ryan Choi, beat Chamley-Watson’s Team Sword 5-1 in the team format, and Choi closed the night by taking the headline solo bout 16-13 against the league’s own founder for a $10,000 prize.
Hamilton posted about it on Instagram Stories afterward anyway, calling the whole thing a major achievement and reminding his followers that he and Chamley-Watson have been close since the 2015 Met Gala.
A decade of Olympics, after-parties, and now a fencing league launch.
Fencing has an audience problem, and Chamley-Watson knows it better than anyone still competing. Olympic fencing is governed by rules that reward patience, footwork most viewers can’t read, and bouts that end before casual fans figure out who scored. FCI’s pitch, per the league’s own materials and Chamley-Watson’s interviews around the launch, is to fix that with three changes: shorter and faster matches, AI-tracked blades that let broadcasters visualize hits in real time, and mixed-gender team rosters competing against each other directly.
That last part is the bit traditionalists will argue about for years. Olympic fencing keeps men’s and women’s events strictly separate. FCI doesn’t. Chamley-Watson has said the format sees Olympic-caliber athletes in a presentation built for people who’ve never watched a tournament, and the LA crowd, judging by the sellout and the celebrity turnout, was the proof of concept he needed.
The $10,000 prize purse is small by F1 standards and small by tennis standards, but for fencing it shows that someone is trying to put money on the table.
Hamilton has spent his entire career attaching his name to projects that try to widen the door into traditionally white, traditionally exclusive sports, and a Chamley-Watson-founded fencing league fits that brief. The two met at the Met Gala in 2015, and the friendship has been photographed across red carpets, Olympic appearances in Tokyo and Paris, and various fashion weeks ever since. When Chamley-Watson talks about wanting fencing to feel like a cultural event rather than a niche Olympic sport, having a seven-time F1 world champion in the front row is roughly the most efficient way to sell that pitch.
The LA event sold out, and while losing your own opening night 16-13 isn’t what he wanted, its success was much more important. And getting Lewis Hamilton to post about it is the kind of marketing money can’t buy.