Van Brummen’s travels take her to Tokyo
Princeton success, European club help spark Houston native’s drive
Anna Van Brummen has won championships on three continents and shuttled from Houston to New Jersey to Switzerland to California in search of athletic and academic pursuits that grew, in part, out of a child’s whim after an impromptu outing with friends.
Van Brummen, 26, will represent the United States at the Tokyo Olympics as part of the women’s epee fencing team, which also includes sisters Kelley and Courtney Hurley of San Antonio and Houston.
She will be the replacement athlete, which means she can appear in the team competition but will not compete in the individual event.
Van Brummen picked up the sport at age 8, when she accompanied a friend to Salle Mauro, a longtime Houston fencing academy.
“My friend was in a fencing class, and her parents asked me if I wanted to go with her. I said sure,” she said. “After that, I went home and said, ‘Mom, I’ve got to fence,’ and here we are.”
Fencing took her from Houston, where she attended Duchesne Academy and Awty International School, to Princeton University, where she majored in geoscience, to Zurich, where she earned a master’s degree from the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology.
Along the way, she became the first U.S. fencer to win a fencing World Cup event, in 2016, and moved to Santa Barbara, Calif., to work as an environmental consultant.
Among Van Brummen’s coaches at Salle Mauro was Andrey Geva, who left the club to start Alliance Fencing Academy in Spring Branch and is national epee coach for USA Fencing. She remained at Salle Mauro until she was 14, when she moved to Alliance and made her first USA Fencing junior world team at age 16.
She took off a year at Princeton and returned to
Houston to train for an unsuccessful attempt to make the 2016 Rio de Janeiro Olympics team, a disappointment that, for a time, derailed her career ambitions.
“It brought me down, and I didn’t know how to bring myself up and approach fencing again,” she said. “But after a few months off, I realized that I loved it and missed it.”
She won the post-Olympics World Cup title in Suzhou, China, and a year later won the NCAA championship at Princeton and earned a team gold medal at the Pan American Championships in Peru.
After graduating from Princeton, she and her boyfriend moved to Switzerland to study at the Swiss institute, which has one of the top-ranked earth
science programs in the world. Her master’s thesis concerned methods to harness geothermal energy, a field that led her not back to Houston, but to California.
“When COVID hit, I was planning to stay in Switzerland until the Olympics,” she said. “But the delay changed my plans, and I moved to Santa Barbara with my boyfriend.”
Van Brummen’s time in Europe benefited her sports career as well as her academic standing. She trained with a top Swiss club and qualified for the Olympic team based on her performance at European World Cup events.
Oddly enough, she said the seemingly refined sport of fencing has a lot in common with the search for energy solutions.
As a fencer, Van Brummen’s style is akin to that of a counterpuncher, focusing on footwork and avoiding blade-to-blade contact while looking for openings against her opponent.
As a scientist, she works for a company called Blue Tomorrow that is analyzing methods to determine recovery methods for national forests damaged by the recent California wildfires.
The two are not unlike, she said, in their mental challenges.
“Fencing is about your experience, how well you handle pressure and how well you can problem solve,” she said. “And then comes the physical part, which is acting out your ideas. Every touch is unique, and it’s always fun.”