Nine fencers will represent Qatar at the Games.
Doha, Qatar: Qatar’s fencing team is heading to the 20th Asian Games in Aichi-Nagoya, Japan, with a clear goal: win the country’s first-ever medal in the sport at the Games. The event runs from September 19 to October 4.
Nine fencers will represent Qatar: Ali Turki Awida, Khalid Arif Hussein, Abdullah Ismail Khalifa, Abdulrahman Bourghrib, Abdulrahman Al-Jadra, Mohammed Abdulali, Yousef Abdul-Tawab, Ali Al-Khalif, and Isabelle Bettadini, the team’s only female competitor. They are part of a much larger Qatari delegation of 243 athletes — 184 men and 59 women — competing in 26 sports at the Games.
Zamel Al-Shammari, a board member of the Qatar Fencing Federation, is leading the delegation. Three coaches — Ines Boubakri, Alvaro Felipe Monteiro, and Hugues Thierry Dergal — oversee the team.
The team has trained hard for this moment.
The men held a camp at Aspire Academy from August 23 to 29, while the women trained in Italy from August 17 to 25.
Both squads will finish their preparation with one last camp in Tokyo, from September 13 to 20, just before competition begins.
The Aspire Academy camp drew fencers from six countries besides Qatar: the Netherlands, Greece, Argentina, Malaysia, Thailand, and Saudi Arabia.
In total, 66 fencers took part, including Saudi Arabia’s Khalifa Al-Amiri, who won bronze in épée at the World Championships in Hong Kong, and the Netherlands’ Tristan Tullen, an Olympic fencer who won the Doha Grand Prix in January.
Sixteen coaches ran 12 training sessions over six days, giving Qatari fencers a chance to test themselves against different styles from Europe, Asia, and the Arab world.
Khalid Suwaid, senior administrative expert at the Qatar Fencing Federation, said the camp was a major boost for the team.
Speaking to Qatar News Agency, he said the goal now is not just to compete, but to finish among Asia’s top four teams and fight for medals.
Qatar first competed in fencing at the Asian Games when it hosted the event in 2006.
Since then, the team has taken part in every edition — Guangzhou 2010, Incheon 2014, Jakarta-Palembang 2018, and Hangzhou 2023 — without winning a medal.
That changed in October 2025. At the Asian Fencing Championships for under-23s in Kuala Lumpur, Qatar’s épée team beat the Philippines and Thailand before losing the final to Uzbekistan by a single point. The silver medal was Qatar’s first-ever Asian medal in fencing. The team behind it: Abdulrahman Al-Jadra, Yousef Abdul-Tawab, Mohammed Abdulali, and Ali Al-Khalif.
The Kuala Lumpur medal was part of a wider run of good results. At the 2023 World Combat Games in Riyadh, Qatar won four medals: gold in men’s foil team (Awida, Hussein, and Khalifa), individual bronze in foil for Khalifa, bronze in men’s épée team (Meshal Al-Qahtani, Mohammed Al-Awlan, Mohammed Abdulali, and Mohammed Al-Hazza), and bronze in women’s épée team (Haya Diab, Sara Diab, and Sheikha Jassim Ali).
At the 2025 West Asian Championships, Qatar won 12 medals in total — six gold, two silver, and four bronze.
The team also took gold in team foil at the 2025 Arab Championships in Bahrain, thanks to Abdullah Ismail and Khalid Aref, and added a gold and a silver in foil at the 2026 Gulf Games in Doha.
There is young talent coming through too.
Isabelle Bettadini reached the quarterfinals at the Asian Junior Fencing Championships in Singapore last month.
