Gillian Sheen was a rank outsider in the women’s individual foil fencing competition at the Melbourne Olympics in 1956, but she had a secret weapon to complement her trusty foil. As a dental surgeon she pulled teeth for a living, the quicker the better to limit her patients’ ordeal. As a result she developed powerful wrists that aided her rapier thrusts as she pulled off one of the surprises of the Games to win a gold medal for Great Britain.
No British man or woman had won a fencing gold medal, and none has won one since, in an event that has been dominated by France, Italy and eastern European nations. When Sheen progressed to the second round she was considered to have surpassed expectations and beaten off her jet lag after a wearisome series of flights to Melbourne over four days. She initially performed poorly in the round-robin series of second-round bouts but scraped into the final with victory over Lidia Domolky-Sakovics, the Hungarian world champion.
Pitted against five other highly ranked fencers who were considered superior, Sheen was determined just to enjoy the experience, especially after she lost her opening bout of the final round-robin series to Olga Orban of Romania. Sheen won her next bout, narrowly, and then another. In athletic parlance she was in “the zone” and after coming through her next two bouts with nailbiting wins, the frisson of excitement was replaced by a growing belief that she could win gold. With her fifth consecutive win she won the right to face Orban in a fight-off, known in fencing as a barrage, to decide the winner.
Sheen continued to defy expectations, catching Orban by surprise with three hits and building up a 3-2 lead. As the bout entered its final moments, she parried Orban’s frenzied attempts to draw level. After catching Orban off balance during one of these attacks, Sheen won a decisive hit to win 4-2. Somewhat dazed at what she had achieved, she told Australian broadcasters in a quiet voice after her victory, “I suppose Mum and Dad will be pleased”. On the medal podium, she began to realise what she had just achieved. No British media was present but news of one of Great Britain’s most unexpected gold medals was soon wired to London and Mr and Mrs Sheen duly confirmed that they were indeed “very pleased”.
Trying to explain this unexpected outcome, her coaches pointed to Sheen’s cool and even temperament in the heat of battle and her insistence on adhering to a classical technique in preference to the more athletic style of fencing that had become popular.
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She herself attributed some of her success to the introduction of an electronic scoring system shortly before the Games. “It was a feature that really helped me,” she recalled. “I felt so much more confidence that the hits would be clean and clear, and no question about it.” She also recalled that the women were kept strictly apart from the men in the Olympic village, which ensured there were no distractions. She told The Olympian newsletter in 2019. “There was a fence round our part, with sentries on the gates. The only people to have fun were the pole-vaulters.”
She was fêted on her return home and even travelled to Budapest with two male team-mates to give a fencing demonstration. The only problem was that having hired a small single-prop aircraft for the trip from Biggin Hill airport in Kent, she failed to inform the authorities. The British government had no idea about the trip and on the return flight the fencing party’s aircraft was viewed as highly suspicious by the US air force patrolling West German airspace. Having persuaded the Americans not to blast the aircraft out of the skies, Sheen lived to publish the guidebook, Instructions to Young Fencers.
Gillian Sheen was born in Willesden, north London, in 1928 and brought up in St John’s Wood near by. She was the youngest of four children to Ronald, a City accountant, and Ethel Sheen. She attended North Foreland School, where she took up fencing and won the British schoolgirl title in 1945 and the British junior championship in 1947.
Sheen went on to train at University College Hospital in London, earning a degree as an orthodontist and winning several college fencing competitions. Sheen had examples to look up to as British women had some heritage in Olympic fencing from the days when Gladys Davies (1924), Muriel Freeman (1928) and Judy Guinness Penn-Hughes (1932) won Olympic silver medals in the women’s individual foil.
Most days Sheen attended the Salle Bertrand fencing club in London for an hour after work and took on all comers; she claimed that even by competing against beginners she could learn something. Her preferred meal after a practice session, aimed at giving her a sporting edge as well as being rather civilised, was steak and watercress washed down with a glass of burgundy.
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She competed in her first Olympics at Helsinki in 1952 and was eliminated early, but won a silver medal at the British Empire and Commonwealth Games in Canada in 1954. She followed up her Olympic win with a gold medal in the British Empire and Commonwealth Games in Cardiff in 1958. Defending her Olympic title at the Rome Games in 1960, she could not repeat the miracle of Melbourne and was eliminated in the second round. She won her tenth and final British championship in 1960.
In 1961 she met Bob Donaldson, a dental surgeon, while working for a year in Rochester, New York. They married the following year and established a family orthodontics practice in Auburn, New York. In the 1980s she founded the first orthodontic practice on the Caribbean island of Montserrat and two weeks every other month she would give the islanders affordable dental care. She continued to travel regularly to Montserrat to treat her patients after the island was devastated by a volcano in 1995.
Sheen retired from dentistry in the early 2000s. Her husband died in 2004. She is survived by their children: Bruce, the chief executive of a financial services company; John, the CFO of a software company; Jane, a flight attendant with United Airlines; and David, a cardiac electrophysiologist.
She played tennis and golf into old age and a mean hand of bridge, but never lost her love of fencing. Continuing to coach the sport until the age of 80, Sheen financially supported any promising young British fencer that came to her attention.
Recognition for her services to British fencing was long in coming, but she was delighted to be appointed MBE in the Queen’s birthday honours in 2019 at the age of 90 — in fencing terms it was a “hit acknowledged”.
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Gillian Sheen MBE, Olympic fencer, was born on August 21, 1928. She died of complications from a stroke on July 5, 2021, aged 92