Elderly competitors still find fencing fun
“I enjoy the competition, but more important than that I enjoy the camaraderie. It’s a community that I belong to.”
For the oldest competitors in the USA Fencing National Championships, age is just a number, not an impediment.
Athletes in their 70s and 80s are taking up the epee, foil and sabre at the Greater Columbus Convention Center as they challenge themselves physically and mentally.
On the women’s side, the most senior division is for ages 70 and older, and it attracted 22 competitors.
Like most of the women in that division, Joanne Stevens of Fencers Club Inc. in New York opted to participate in only one discipline. The strategy worked as Stevens took home the gold medal in the epee Tuesday, beating Madelon Rosenfeld of New York’s Tim Morehouse Fencing Club with a decisive 10-3 victory.
“I started about five years after college; I saw a flyer in the street and I thought it sounded interesting,” Stevens said. “People said to me, ‘Why did you pick fencing?’ and I had no real idea. Sometimes I think that if you believe in former lives — which I don’t think I do — that maybe I was a woman warrior in a former life.”
With the win, Stevens Jim Adams
earned a spot on the United States team at the World Veterans Fencing Championships, which will take place in Cairo from Oct. 5 to 11. There, she’ll look to repeat her successful performance of last year, when she finished third overall in Livorno, Italy.
“When you fence internationally, I find it really exciting to meet women of my age all over the world — it’s like the ultimate test,” Stevens said. “You’re fencing people from Japan and Australia and Russia. … It’s an interesting measurement to see how you fit in the world as an athlete at this age.”
On the men’s side, there were six competitors in the 80-and-over division. One athlete who opted to compete in the epee, saber and foil categories is Jim Adams, a Presbyterian pastor from Rockville, Maryland.
“I’m here, why not?” he said.
Adams has been fencing on and off since his freshman year at Princeton, where he got an unexpected start with the sport.
“When I got to Princeton, they offered me free lessons and a minimum amount of money for the equipment if I would be on the fencing team,” he said. “What I wanted was a letter sweater and I got one, and everything after that’s been gravy.”
The team finished third in the NCAA during Adams’ junior year and second his senior year.
“I can’t say there’s any one thing (that keeps me involved). I enjoy the competition, but more important than that I enjoy the camaraderie. It’s a community that I belong to,” he said. “I took a long break because I was raising kids and coaching my daughter in softball. In ’95, I came back to it and found out about the older categories and fell in love with it all over again.”