Foil, Individual, Women

World and Olympic champion Ilona Elek-Schacherer cruised through the early stages by winning all 15 of her bouts and appeared pretty much invincible. However she lost twice in a final pool stage that proved so close that six of the ten finalists were involved in barrages to decide the medal winners. Elek-Schacherer’s record was still good enough to place her in the gold medal match against the lightly regarded outsider Irene Camber-Corno of Italy. It came as a major shock that the Italian defeated the veteran Hungarian to clinch the Olympic title on a 4-3 score line. The four woman tie-break for the bronze medal was won by Karen Lachmann of Denmark. Camber-Corno won the 1953 World Championship but was unable to defend her Olympic title in Melbourne due to pregnancy. She returned in 1960 to add a team bronze medal to her gold and also competed in Tokyo.

In the pools, if two or more fencers had the same number of victories and the tie had to be broken to determine which fencer(s) qualified for the next round or to determine the gold medalist in the final round, then barrage bouts were fenced to resolve the tie. In all other cases, ties were resolved by whichever fencers had the fewest number of touches received or, if there was a tie in touches received, then by the greatest number of touches given. The number of touches scored in the barrage bouts is not known.