Eleanor Harvey won Canada’s first-ever Olympic fencing medal, a bronze, with a victory over Italy’s Alice Volpi in the individual foil event. This is the 29-year-old’s third Olympics, as she finished seventh in Rio and 16th in Tokyo.
Harvey, who is from Hamilton, Ont., started fencing when she was 10 years old. At first, she tried karate, but later realized it was not an Olympic sport, and wanted to pick up something else.
She wrote in a first-person piece for CBC in 2022: “Watching the 2000 Sydney Games, I decided that I would be an Olympian one day … A family friend suggested fencing after hearing a radio interview with legendary Canadian fencer Sherraine Schalm.”
While Volpi was ranked fourth in the world going into this match — and Harvey was 14th — the Canadian had won four of the last seven matches between the two.
“It’s going to take some time to absorb the feeling because when I scored the last point I couldn’t believe it and I still can’t believe it,” Harvey said after winning bronze. “It’s weird. It’s a very strange, surreal feeling.”
Harvey also credited her mother, Lise Graydon, for getting her to this point in her fencing career.
“She’s made a lot of sacrifices for me. In Tokyo she couldn’t be there because nobody could be there, so it’s really, really cool that she was able to be here, watch me have the best fencing result of my life, have a really good day, and see all her love and support pay off, ” Harvey said.
“I know that however I would have done she would still view it as her sacrifices paying off, but it’s nice to have a concrete thing to hold and be like sweet, this actually happened.
“She pretty much paid for all the fencing, before I had support, by herself and she had to sell her house to afford to send me to tournaments and we had to move in with my grandma and my grandma would sleep on a couch so I could have a bed. So it’s not just my mom, it’s my whole family. So yeah, it feels good.”