Eleanor Harvey claims bronze for Canada’s first Olympic fencing medal

Like a lot of boys and girls Eleanor Harvey used to love sword fighting in the backyard of her home in Hamilton as a kid, slashing and smashing her friends with whatever weapon she could find.

She had no idea back then that fencing even existed as a sport or that it was something you could win a medal for at the Olympics. She’d dreamed of going to the Olympics one day, but her sports were karate and track. And then her mother’s boyfriend told her about fencing.

“He suggested fencing because it’s similar to karate in terms of it’s a martial-art kind of thing,” Harvey recalled. “So when I found out sword fighting was in the Olympics, I was like, ‘I’m going to the Olympics in sword fighting.’”

She was 10 years old when she first picked up a fencing blade. On Sunday, 19 years later, she won a bronze medal in women’s foil at the Paris Olympics, claiming Canada’s first medal in the sport in the iconic Grand Palais before a raucous crowd.

She did it by defeating world No. 4 Alice Volpi of Italy 15-12 in the bronze-medal match with an aggressive style that came after a pep talk with her coaches. “They were, like, ‘you’re fighting for a medal. If you’re going to lose at least go out fighting.’ And that resonated with me. So it just was like, I’m going for it,” she said.

Harvey went into the Paris Games ranked 14th in the world and she won three matches against fencers ranked fourth, fifth and third before losing to the eventual gold medalist, Lauren Scruggs of the United States, in the semi-finals.

“I was just surprised,” she said of her immediate reaction to her bronze-medal victory. “I was like, I did it or something.” And even after the match ended, she still wasn’t sure how she did it.

“For some reason today I fenced well. I train just as hard whether it’s the Olympics or not. For some reason it was good. It was, like, really good today,” she added with a smile. When asked if she felt anything special when she woke up on Sunday, Harvey replied flatly, “Not at all.”

This is her third Olympics. Her best finish until now had been fifth in the team foil event at the Tokyo Olympics. She has also won multiple medals at the Pan Am Games, including gold at the 2015 Games in team foil. And she enjoyed a successful college career at Ohio State University.

“For me, it’s taken the full commitment of my entire life to put myself in a position where I could be the best I can be,” she said Sunday. She added that her mother sold her house in Hamilton to help pay for Harvey’s training. “I think if I had siblings she wouldn’t have been able to do that.”

She met her mother after the medal presentation on Sunday and joked that there were no tears or joyous outbursts. “I kind of thought I would be emotional or something. But it wasn’t that emotional. We were both just like, ‘Nice, this is good.’”

Fencing is hardly a major sport in Canada and Harvey said she spent years being coached by foreign-born fencers. That has begun to change, which Harvey credited to the success of people such as Sherraine Schalm, a former world No. 1 who won a bronze medal at the 2005 world fencing championships and an overall World Cup title a year later.

Schalm has been an inspiration for Harvey. “I would see her at tournaments when I was 11 and just stare at her and be, this is a God,” she said.

She hopes that maybe she will be an inspiration, too, for some other boys and girls who might take up the sport and join the “weirdos” like her. “A lot of people who get into it are like, ‘Wow, I like lightsabers’ or they are like, ‘I’m a knight,’” she said with a laugh. “I feel it kind of selects an interesting type of personality.”