Q: What do you love about fencing?
A: I love that fencing is both a very combative sport. It is a martial art at the end of the day, but at the same time is super elegant. It's highly precise, you need to be very tactical and strategic. But at the same time, you're there to win a fight. And I think the combination between those two has always been a really exciting challenge for me to try to find and perform, and what would be the word? And refine.
Q: Let's talk about how you got into it, what drew you to the sport?
A: My mom was a rhythmic gymnast, she was on the Polish national team and she put me into rhythmic gymnastics as a child, both me and my sister. We walked by fencing every day to get to gymnastics, and one day I think we just looked over and thought, why are we dancing around in Rhinestone leotards when we could be stabbing people with forks? That seemed like much more fun. And to be honest, I showed a lot more promise at an early age in fencing than I did in gymnastics. I won my first national championship when I was 11, and from that moment on, it was scrap gymnastics and we're fencing all the way.
Q: Why weren’t women historically allowed to compete?
A: The thought was that women's bodies weren't capable of handling that type of stress, which is obviously not true. We actually had a pretty famous sabre fencer in the most recent Olympic Games compete seven months pregnant. Yeah. Pretty badass. I would say one of the things I love about fencing is the fact that men and women actually train together in almost every country. The teams are separate, the competitions are separate. But especially at a young age and even as you continue to get older, it's very common that men and women train together. And for that reason, I like to think that male fencers have more respect for female fencers and for women's fencing than they do in other sports.
Q: What do you like about how fencing makes you feel?
A: I like that fencing allows me to use both my mind and my body in tandem with one another. I feel when I'm fencing, or at least when I'm fencing well, when I'm in the zone or what one would call flow, that from a mental perspective, I can see everything. I feel like I know everything that's going to happen. And from a physical perspective, like my body is going to do exactly what I tell it to do and that it's going to do it right. And I feel like there's very few endeavors in life where you can feel like that in both mind and body.
Q: What is some advice you have for young fencers?
A: The main thing I hope to exemplify to them is that you will be a better fencer the more you bring your authentic self into your fencing. The more you incorporate who you are as a person into how you fence, the better your fencing will be. And I think that's true in the majority of sports, but it's definitely true in fencing. I think nowadays, especially with social media, there's so much peer pressure at school and outside influence from social media to be XYZ. And none of that will help them. What will help them is listening to their inner voice and making sure that their voice is the loudest in the room always, including when they're on the strip, including and especially when they're on the strip.
Q: Do you ever feel like you want to give up? We all have those moments. How do you get over that feeling?
A: I had that moment. Because I suffered an injury in 2021 which was so bad that I nearly medically retired. I thought there was a very big chance that I would not be able to fence at the level that I had been fencing previously. And that it wouldn't make sense for my health and well-being long-term to continue fencing. And that was my biggest moment of reckoning with how much do I love the sport and how much do I feel like it's worth it? And I think for me it was. When you have those moments of feeling like you want to give up or feeling like it's not worth it, at the end of that moment, you will have an answer for yourself, nine times out of ten, whether you want to keep going or whether you want to stop. And for me it was to keep going. And it is to keep going.
Q: What's next for you? What are you looking forward to?
A: After I'm finished at Oxford this December, I'm moving back to New York to focus on training for the 2028 Olympics, which are pretty conveniently being held in my hometown of Los Angeles. So it would be a home Olympics and it would be very special to me if I were to make that. I'll be training for 2032 afterwards and I intend to have a long career in this sport, but it'd be pretty special if I were to make LA, and I think everyone knows that.
