I never had any goals when I started. I was 8. My parents never fenced. It was all by chance. My father happened to be the president of a synagogue where a fencing coach happened to be renting out space. I happened to have a free summer that my mother happened to fill with fencing lessons.
I fell in love with it at 8, and wanted to be the best when I was 10. The pinnacle of my sport is the Olympic Games. And that is all I had my eyes on. To get there, it requires years and years of training and competing. So, in a sense, the rise from local and regional competitions to national and international competitions happens on its own. If you qualify for national competitions, and perform well at them, your national ranking affords you the opportunity to travel with a selected team abroad. At the end of an international season, the top 4 Americans that did the best get put together on a team and are sent to World Championships to represent the United States. I made my first Under 16 world team in 2015. That year in Tashkent, Uzbekistan, I won my first world championship title. I was on three Under 19 world teams, where I captured my second world title, which eventually led to a spot on the senior national travel team. Going into the Olympic year, this senior national travel team went through the Olympic trials where the same rules applied: the top 4 Americans at the end of the season go to the Olympic Games.
This is how I went from competing at local competitions to representing the United States at our “Olympic trials”. Fencing taught me that if you are passionate about something, setting goals help in the process of improving. I wanted to go to the Olympic Games, so the process of getting into fencing internationally was a necessary part of the process to get there.
After not finishing in the top 4 at the end of the Olympic season, I was designated as an Olympic Alternate. The American athletes that I was competing against are friends that I have trained with for years. I have been teammates with all of them in one way or another. Our matches against each other over the years have gotten us all to this point.
While it was painful to watch others go and compete, I first want to commend my competitors that qualified. It is one of the most difficult roads there is. It requires what seems like infinite hours of training and traveling. Ups, downs, injuries, hiccups, external pressure, internal pressure, all of it. They get through it all to qualify and then compete on THE MOST competitive stage in the world.
Members of the Olympic team reached out to ask that I travel to Tokyo with them as a training partner before and during the Games. Unfortunately, I had to decline due to conflicts with beginning medical school; however, I was fortunate enough to be a part of their journey to the Olympics just as much as they were a part of mine.