Hurleys work back into fencing shape
Kelley Hurley was hard at work this spring, focused on distance learning classwork for her studies at St. James School of Medicine in the Caribbean, when she was struck by an unfamiliar question.
“I thought, ‘Where is Courtney?’ ” Hurley said.
It wasn’t a frequent question for Team Hurley, sisters Kelly and Courtney. From childhood trips through their careers as Olympics medal-winning epee fencers, wherever you found one Hurley sister, the other would be nearby.
That changed, though, in the pandemic spring of 2021, with the Summer Olympics on hold and the mental grind of lockdown and travel restrictions bearing down.
Kelley Hurley, 33, was at home in Houston, focusing on medical school classwork that she hopes will lead to a career in public health. Courtney Hurley, 30, was clearing her head, loading her dogs into a renovated van for a camping trip across the western United States.
“We’re so used to being together that we don’t text
much. We were always together,” Kelly said. “But after two or three months, I was thinking, ‘Where is she? I haven’t heard from her in a while. Then we started messaging each other more.”
Their time apart, in appropriate fashion for these unsettled times, ended suddenly. Both got a message from their coach, Andrey Geva, that they had one month to train for their first competition in a year, a World Cup in Kazan, Russia.
Courtney drove back from California, and Team Hurley was together once more. The sisters will remain in lockstep through July, where they will compete in Tokyo as individuals and as members of the USA Fencing women’s epee team.
It will be the fourth Olympics for Kelley and the third for Courtney. The San Antonio natives, who moved to Houston to train at Alliance Fencing Academy in the Spring Branch area, won a bronze medal at the 2012 London Olympics and this year will be teamed with Anna Van Brummen of Houston, who attended Awty International and Princeton University and now trains in California.
The U.S. team, which also includes Katherine Holmes of Washington, D.C., finished eighth in Kazan in their only prep meet for Tokyo. The Hurleys and Holmes were members of the U.S. team that won the 2018 world championships in China, the first world gold medal in women’s epee for the United States.
“It went better than I thought,” Kelley said. “Medical school has been so difficult that I didn’t have much energy to train, and with the Olympic delay, I didn’t see much of a point.
“They told us they would give us three months’ notice (for the World Cup), but I only had a month to get my butt back into a shape after a year of doing the bare minimum.”
The Hurleys qualified early last year for the Tokyo Games, so their only question was whether the Olympics would take place after the year-long delay because of the COVID-19 pandemic. But while they didn’t face the pressure of qualifying once more, the uncertain times and the lack of competition weighs
on them as it does on all athletes heading to Tokyo.
“It’s going to be an interesting competition this goround, because everyone is in the same boat,” Kelley said. “Nobody knows what to expect. There are no favorites. We have as good a chance as anybody.”
The sisters’ first fencing coach was their father, Robert Hurley, who picked up the sport in Houston before he and his wife, Tracy, who teaches at Texas A&MSan Antonio, moved from Houston to San Antonio when the girls were ages 4 and 2.
Kelley, who fences lefthanded, and Courtney, who is a righthander, graduated from high school in San Antonio and competed for Notre Dame before becoming staples of the USA Fencing epee team. Kelley Hurley competed in the 2008 Olympics, and the sisters were teammates in the 2012 and 2016 Olympics.
The 2020 postponement created issues for both sisters. Kelley Hurley chose to begin medical school while retaining her berth on the Olympic team, and Courtney opted to hit the road.
“Our parents had a van that they used to drive us to fencing tournaments as kids, and I had it renovated and traveled for four months from New Mexico to Colorado, Utah, Nevada, California, Oregon and then back down to Arizona and New Mexico,” she said.
The return to competition in Russia, Courtney said, was a tough one.
“I need my mental game in top shape because I rely on strategy,” she said. “I could feel the rust. The only way to compete is to compete.”
When the Olympics are done, Courtney will resume traveling and will collaborate with her mother on an event-planning app that she hopes to debut by Christmas.
Neither will rule out an effort to qualify for the
2024 Paris Olympics, even though that could further delay Kelley’s medical training.
While she won’t settle on a specialty until she begins hospital rotation as an intern, the pandemic has reinforced her interest in public health, the subject of her master’s degree.
“It’s been chaotic, and it still seems pretty chaotic,” she said. “There has to be a way to avoid something like this or something else, another big pandemic shutting down the world.
“It probably was inevitable, and it could happen again. I would love to be involved with a project figuring out a way to keep it from happening again.”
The Hurleys’ time in Houston likely will come to an end as travel and medical school commitments continue, and they’ll be spending less time together once more. Both women, however, have downloaded the Life360 family networking app so they can track each other’s travels.
“Being in Houston has been the main ingredient for us to be able to do what we have been able to do,” Kelley Hurley said. “We’ve trained with the national team coach (Alliance Fencing owner Andrey Geva) at one of the best epee clubs in the country and stayed close to our family. It’s been the perfect mixture.”