Princeton In Paris Feature: Maia Chamberlain
July 18, 2024 | Women's Fencing
The sport of fencing is contested in three different weapons. To the untrained eye, they make look relatively similar. In the fencing community, they couldn’t be more different. In many ways, it’s your personality that determines your preferred weapon as much as anything. Maia Chamberlain, a 2024 United States Olympian who will compete in Paris, was a saberist from Day 1 of her fencing career.
The sport of fencing is contested in three different weapons. To the untrained eye, they make look relatively similar. In the fencing community, they couldn’t be more different. In many ways, it’s your personality that determines your preferred weapon as much as anything.
Maia Chamberlain, a 2024 United States Olympian who will compete in Paris, was a saberist from Day 1 of her fencing career.
In epee and foil, there is a button at the end of the blade. To score a point, that button has to be pressed against the opponent. In saber, it’s a bit different. In saber, any metal-on-metal contact from the sword against the opponent’s jacket sets off the light for a score.
“When I was nine, my parents asked made if I wanted to try fencing,” she says. “I thought it would be like ‘Pirates of the Caribbean’ or ‘Star Wars,’ so I said yes. Saber very much resembled that. The other two [weapons] are more technical. Saber is a little crazier.”
The first Princetonian to fence in the Olympic Games was a foilist named Henry Breckenridge of the Class of 1907, who actually competed in three different Olympiads, winning bronze in the team foil in 1920 in Antwerp and then returning in 1924 to Paris and 1928 to Amsterdam.
More than 100 years later, Chamberlain will be representing Princeton fencing in Paris, and she will hardly be the only Tiger there. In fact, there will be seven current or former Princeton fencers there: Chamberlain, Sabrina Fang, Mohamed Hamza, Kat Holmes, Hadley Husisian, Tatiana Nazlymov and Maia Weintraub.
The Ivy League is a launching spot for Olympic fencing. Of the 117 Ivy League athletes who will compete in Paris, there are 20 who are fencers.
You don’t need to have been to Paris to know that it is home to some of the world’s most famous architecture. This would seem to be something that will appeal greatly to Chamberlain, an architecture major who graduated in 2022.
Of course, it wouldn’t matter if the Olympics were held in Paris, France, or Paris, Texas. Getting there has been a huge, longtime effort for Chamberlain.
“I came close last time,” she says. “It just didn’t work out. Maybe if it hadn’t been for the pandemic, I would have made it. I had a lot of momentum going when everything was shut down.”
That momentum included winning an NCAA individual championship in 2018, after reaching the semifinals the year before. Should all of her success come as a surprise? Not to her first fencing coach.
It took exactly one week after she first tried it for the coach to tell her parents that she should stick with it. To that point, her main sport was tennis, though she was also on basketball and soccer teams, while also swimming and biking.
Within a few months she’d gone from being introduced to fencing to getting third place in the Under-10 national championships. The event was held in San Jose, near her Northern California home. Had it required travel, she probably would have skipped it.
She won her first national championship at the age of 14. A year later, she started her international travels, making a world team and even finishing in the top eight. Like most standout youth fencers, she would see the world with her sport, competing in 15 different countries while in high school.
“Uzbekistan was my favorite,” she says. “It was amazing. The architecture was stunning. It was also Central Asia, and the people looked like I do [her mother is from Malaysia; her father is from Australia]. The experience was stunning for me. I’m grateful for fencing, which gave me so many great experiences.”
She narrowed her college choices to Princeton and Stanford and ultimately chose to come to Princeton because she wanted to get away from home. She started down the path of being an architecture major, and she also found herself in something that was new for her, being on an actual fencing team.
“It was very refreshing to be on a team,” she says. “Fencing in general is such an individual sport. When I got to Princeton, it was so great to feel the support of your peers. In college fencing, you genuinely want everyone to do well.”
She arrived in the fall of 2016 as part of the Class of 2020, and her freshman year saw her earn All-American honors while finishing third at the NCAA championships in saber. Chamberlain, who went 19-4 during the pool bouts to advance to the individual stage, rallied from a 13-10 deficit to tie Penn State's Teodora Kakhiani in her semifinal at 13-13, but Kakhiani won 15-14 to reach the final. The next year Chamberlain again reached the semifinals, against Notre Dame’s Francesca Russo, a future Olympian. It was not easy, but Chamberlain pulled away to win 15-12.
“The key with fencing is mental toughness,” Chamberlain says. “At the collegiate level, or national or international level, everyone has a similar skillset. It’s all about experience and mentality.”
Chamberlain followed that match by winning her championship bout 15-11 over Penn State’s Zara Moss.
“I had much more confidence in the final,” Chamberlain says. “When I won, it didn’t really hit me at first. It felt like the end of any other match. It only really hit me when my teammates came and started throwing me in the air.”
Both fencers took time off from Princeton to train for the 2020 Olympics, which ultimately became 2021 because of COVID. Neither made the team, but both are focusing on 2024, for which they each have a real shot.
“Whenever you’re competing, the whole team is backing you,” Chamberlain says. “It’s a great sense of community. I never knew you could get that from fencing. College fencing is awesome.”
Olympic fencing figures to be as well. There are only 212 fencers who have qualified, 106 men and 106 women. To be part of that is something incredible.
The women’s sabre event begins Monday, July 29.
— by Jerry Price