Everyone on this US Olympic team went to Harvard

So how is there an entire U.S. team at the Olympics that consists exclusively of guys from Harvard?

When the American men’s saber team takes the piste on Wednesday, the four-man roster will have three Harvard alumni and one incoming Harvard freshman, and the Crimson in red, white and blue are favored to bring home a medal.

But the first all-Harvard team at the Olympics accounts for only half of the school’s fencers in Paris. There are six representing the U.S. and two more for Canada in the Grand Palais, the ornate exhibition hall that has been transformed into the world’s most spectacular fencing venue.

This week, it has also become a Harvard satellite campus.

It’s not just that Harvard has more fencers at the Olympics than other colleges. Harvard has more fencers at the Olympics than most countries.

There are 53 nations with fencers here—and the delegation from Cambridge, Mass. is bigger than 42 of them.

There are so many Harvard fencers running around here with swords that there has already been Crimson-on-Crimson bloodshed. In a matchup of a Harvard senior and sophomore, American foilist Lauren Scruggs beat Canada’s Jessica Guo on her way to an improbable silver medal.

To understand why there are so many Olympic fencers coming from Harvard, it’s important to remember that fencing is basically chess with swords. A sport that demands stabbing and strategizing rewards cerebral athletes, so it’s not surprising that the U.S. team has one fencer from Stanford, two from Columbia, four from Notre Dame, five from Princeton and six from Harvard.

“We’re not super nerdy, but for some reason, we get that stereotype," said Team USA saber fencer Elizabeth Tartakovsky—a Harvard alumna.

What is shocking is that Harvard hasn’t traditionally been a school that sends its best and brightest to Team USA. Before the eight current Olympians, it had a total of nine Olympic fencers in its history—and only five since World War II. In that time, Harvard’s law school put more alumni on the Supreme Court.

But now Harvard has become a fencing powerhouse. This year, the Crimson won the NCAA fencing title for the second time ever. In the past three years, Harvard’s fencers have won six individual titles under coach Daria Schneider, an NCAA saber champion herself—not at Harvard but Columbia.

“When I was looking at colleges, the decision was more like where should I go where I won’t get worse," Schneider says. “Now there’s somewhere I can go and get significantly better."

Scruggs got so much better at Harvard that she went from being ranked 81st in the world before her freshman year to 58th, 18th and 4th going into her senior year, after her stunning run to a silver medal here. She lost to one of the greatest American fencers ever, reigning gold medalist Lee Kiefer, a four-time NCAA champion at Notre Dame—and now a student in medical school.

Harvard’s athletes might be hauling a few more medals back to campus by the time they’re done. Scruggs competes in the team foil event on Thursday, while Eli Dershwitz, Colin Heathcock, Mitchell Saron and Filip Dolegiewicz take the strip on Wednesday.

The transformation of America’s top fencing program was built around recruiting elite talent from across the globe—and born from a scandal.

Schneider was hired as Harvard’s fencing coach in 2019 after her predecessor was swept up in the Varsity Blues college-admissions debacle. As soon as she got the job, she asked Dershwitz, her former training partner, to be one of her assistants. His résumé was impeccable. A recent Harvard graduate, Dershwitz was the world’s No. 1 saber fencer while he was still in school.

It’s not always easy to be an Ivy League student and a fencer on the international circuit. Sometimes, it means doing problem sets on the way to Brown. Other times, it means finishing homework on a plane from Bulgaria. But Dershwitz was living proof that you could be a student and be the best fencer on the planet. And he was key to Schneider’s plan.

She wanted Dershwitz to coach Harvard’s fencers—and she didn’t want him to lower his standards for a bunch of college athletes. They would have to raise their level to keep up with him.

“We just were really relentless about not letting them settle into the habits of a junior-level fencer," Schneider said. “We demanded senior-level greatness from them."

What the members of Schneider’s first recruiting class never imagined is that they would one day be Dershwitz’s teammates at the Olympics.

But by the time Saron and Dolegiewicz enrolled at Harvard in 2019, there may not have been anywhere better in the world to be a saber fencer than a gym outside Boston.

When they came to Harvard, they got coached by Dershwitz—and had to fence against him. It was like having a Nobel laureate as their personal tutor.

Saron and Dolegiewicz credit Dershwitz for making them into the fencers they are today, and it also helped him to have future Olympians as training partners. Last year, right after they graduated, Dershwitz won his first world championship.

But these days, they’re not even the best Harvard fencers on the U.S. saber team.

That distinction belongs to a teenage prodigy who hasn’t started college yet.

Colin Heathcock was born in China, grew up in California, trained in France and competed for Germany before switching to the U.S.—and he’s still only 18 years old. With his freakish talent, he could have gone anywhere.

But he’s moving into a Harvard dorm room because he wants to study math, behavioral economics—and fencing.