The Summer Olympic Games were occupying the “Jeopardy!” time slot this week, but on the bright side, two guys were fencing.

I was such a big Zorro fan at age 4 that I wore a black, long-sleeved Zorro costume on 80-degree days in July.

As the swordplay on TV continued, I wondered if other disappointed “Jeopardy!” viewers knew about West Germany fencer Matthias Behr, who had killed Emma Smirnov’s Ukrainan-born husband in 1982.

Or if they knew that Behr’s attempts to contact Emma went unanswered for decades, even after the Iron Curtain fell in 1989.

Not knowing if she blamed him and unable to shake the guilt of  Smirnov’s death for two decades, Behr stopped his car on a bridge one spring evening in 2002, got out and swung a leg over the wall.

He recalled that he did not jump to his death after realizing that he might land on a car and harm others.

If all that isn’t better than the first couple of minutes, you ever saw on “Jeopardy!,” there’s more.

Behr and Emma had been in contact for five years when Russian dictator Vladimir Putin decided to cascade bombs into Ukraine. So Behr called Emma and offered refuge to her grandchildren.

Rome

Behr was 27 and the world’s No. 2 fencer in 1982. His trademark? A powerful, straight-armed attack.

In the quarterfinals of the ’82 World Fencing Championships in Rome, Behr and top-ranked Vladimir Smirnov simultaneously went on the offense.

Behr triggered a balestra, an advanced fencing hop that ups the tempo and propels the fencer from a defensive posture into a lunge. As Behr attacked, the point of his foil hit the front of Smirnov’s fencing jacket, bending the blade.

It broke.

The jagged edge slid up Smirnov’s chest, pierced his mask, entered his brain through his left eye and exited the back of his head.

Behr screamed and pulled out his bloody foil. Smirnov fell backward. He died 11 days later, at age 28.

Behr fought notions of retirement and won the Olympic gold medal in ’76, but he remained haunted by Smirnov’s death.

Letters

In his biography, Behr explained he had never ceased trying to kindle a relationship with Emma.

“I have written many letters to Mrs. Smirnov describing my feelings. To date, I have had no reply.”

He tried to explain this to himself. “What was she supposed to write to me?”

Still, he openly wished for a response.

In 2017, Behr got one. He learned that Emma did not blame him. He learned that she had hoped to travel from the Soviet Union to Rome in 1982 to be with her dying husband. Instead, she was left in limbo for eight days until Smirnov’s useless body arrived in the Soviet Union, where he died.

She had not even been told of the incident at first. She suspected something was wrong when she and her two children heard on state radio that the Soviets had won the team competition. The only unmentioned team member was Vladimir Smirnov.

“I knew at once that something bad had happened,” she said. “Until the end, I did not experience the extent of this catastrophe.”

She told Behr when they met that she did not even know if her husband’s organs had been donated.

“Perhaps his large and good heart is still beating today and I do not know.”

Smirnov is one of seven elite fencers to die as a result of injuries sustained in competition, and the only one to die by the thin, flexible foil.

Because of Smirnov, those Olympians on TV were safe.

Smirnov’s tragic end led to replacing carbon steel blades with stronger, low-carbon, maraging steel; Kevlar uniforms and stronger masks.

There have been no deaths in high-level fencing since.