Tatiana Nazlymov ’23 qualified for the 2024 Paris Olympics, and will compete in both the individual and team events for women’s sabre for the U.S Olympic fencing team.
For sabre fencing, and all fencing in general, the fencers who are at the top on the National Points list qualify for the Olympics. Individually, the top three people qualify, and the fourth-place fencer is an alternate for the team event.
“Originally, before my last competition, I was fourth and tracking to be an alternate,” Nazlymov said. “Since I did really well in the last competition…I moved up to third, and now I am qualified both individually and [for the] team.” Nazlymov qualified for the Olympics on March 20.
Individual competitions mean that the fencer is competing individually with direct elimination. For team competitions, each team fills out a private sheet before the match of their planned order. There are nine rounds (called bouts) and each person fences the other fencers from the opposing team. The points are cumulative, which means that if the first fencer does well, it is easier for their teammates. The first team to score 45 points (or the team that is leading when time runs out) wins.
There are three kinds of fencing: foil, epee and sabre. Nazlymov is a sabre fencer. Sabre fencing uses a shorter blade with a larger guard that protects your hand. Fencers can score with the tip of the blade, the front of the sword or the last one-third of the sword’s back edge. Sabre matches are quick, and the fencers have to be agile and speedy.
In the Olympics, all fencers are placed in a bracket based on world rankings, and face off in a single elimination tournament.
According to the International Fencing Federation, Nazlymov is ranked 26th globally in women’s sabre senior fencing. The USA is ranked 5th in the world for women’s sabre fencing. There are 64 fencers in the Olympic individual bracket, and they are matched up with no regard for nationality, meaning that it is possible that two fencers from the same country could fence each other.
Nazlymov was on the junior and senior National Team 2022 and 2023. She won Silver at the Plovdiv Junior World Cup 2023. In international competition, she won Silver at the Batumi Senior World Cup Team in 2023, was on the Pan-American Champion Team 2022 and 2023 and was the Division 1 North American Cup Team Champion in 2023.
Nazlymov says her training regime will stay the same in preparation for the Olympics. “Just because it’s the Olympics or whatever, it’s still a competition at the end of the day,” she said. “In the past, for training, I relied a lot on meditation and managing anxiety and competition nerves,” Nazlymov said. “That’ll definitely be heightened at the Olympics, but at the end of the day, the fencing is the same. It’s still the same people I know.”
Currently, she fences at the Division l level on the Princeton team. At Princeton, she has five practices, two one-on-one training sessions with her coach and two lift sessions each week. Nazlymov says it “is definitely more than I did in high school.” In high school, she had practice four times a week, and then four sessions with her trainer, and didn’t lift.
Nazlymov started fencing at nine years old at a local club. “I knew about fencing since I was a baby because my grandfather was a fencer, so every summer we would go to the fencing gym and just fool around.”
Nazlymov’s grandfather is Vladimir Nazlymov, a three-time Olympic champion and ten-time world champion and he was twice named the world’s best sabre fencer by the International Fencing Federation.
Nazlymov said it was always her plan to compete at the collegiate level. She said her family viewed fencing as a good way to get into college. She and her family planned to “start competing, do well, get recruited to college, start traveling internationally if you want,” she said. She says that she was never forced into fencing. “I could quit whenever I wanted to.”
Nazlymov said fencing in college “is definitely a tough adjustment because college is hard…but my results have been getting better, and I’ve been steadily improving in my world rankings.”
While Nazlymov was at GDS, she had to miss a lot of school because of her intense travel schedule. “GDS was fabulous. The teachers were so good about letting me skip school,” she said. She estimated that she missed about 100 classes in her junior year at GDS, including all of December. She was on the national team (the top four fencers in the country) during her junior year.
“She kept up on her school work, even though she missed class,” said high school jazz and instrumental music teacher Brad Linde, who taught Nazlymov. “She sailed through her academics and was always prepared for jazz class.”
In college, Nazlymov says, it is harder to keep up in classes while traveling. “There are certain things I can’t miss, so I have to work around that,” she said. “I am taking a lighter course load this year. I’m taking three instead of four classes so that I can continue to travel.”
“I’ve never had the pleasure of seeing her compete, but I know she’s improved over the years, and obviously Olympic material, considering that she’s going there,” Linde said. “I’m hoping to catch up with her in France before the competition, just because I happened to be over there, but I doubt I’ll get to see her perform unless I watch it on the television.”
Nazlymov said that she feels excited about the upcoming Olympics. “It’s the top athletic competition for any athlete, which is really cool. I’ve never been to anything equivalent.”
The opening ceremony for the 2024 Olympics will be held on July 26.