George Carpenter competed in the épée at two Olympic Games – the 1952 Helsinki Games and the 1960 Rome Games – and at Rome became the oldest competitor in the entire Games at the age of fifty-one, having driven to Rome from Ireland in his own car with his wife Joan over several weeks, organising their own accommodation and training facilities along the way.

A native of Adrigole, County Cork, who spent much of his life in Glenbrook where he was proprietor of the Club Hotel, Carpenter was a regular winner of the Irish Fencing Championship, as was Joan, and taught fencing to others throughout his career – among those he helped prepare was the actor Micheál MacLiammóir, for the fencing scene in a production of Hamlet.

His journey to Helsinki in 1952 was an adventure in its own right: the Irish fencing contingent travelled by boat from Rosslare to Fishguard, by train to Dover and across Europe, sleeping on railway station benches in Hamburg after failing to find hotel or police barracks accommodation, and crossing by boat from Stockholm, where a meal of raw herrings proved inedible.

On arrival at the Olympic Village they were refused entry to the Irish quarters and warned that participation in the Opening Parade would lead to arrest. His admission to the Games in Helsinki had been secured through the intervention of the FIE and IOC President Sigfrid Edström after the OCI’s Standards Committee had initially declined to select him, and he had made the journey at his own expense.

At Rome in 1960, competing in both the individual épée and the épée team event, he found time to arrange a private audience with Pope John XXIII at Castelgandolfo.