En Garde: Two New York Olympic Fencers Are on The Path to Paris

This story is part of Summer & THE CITY, our weekly newsletter made to help you enjoy — and survive — the hottest time in the five boroughs. Sign up here .

Last year, while working as a medical office receptionist and moonlighting as a fashion model, Anne Cebula began to contemplate retirement.

Cebula, an epee fencer and Barnard alum, was already a two-time Division I national champion, and claimed the honor of becoming the first Barnard student athlete ever to claim an individual NCAA national title, in any sport. She continued to fence after graduating and, with a neuroscience degree under her belt, was considering her grad school options.

But she had an itch she needed to scratch.

“I knew I was going to retire after this year, so it was kind of like, ‘OK, I’m going to make one last push to make it to the Olympics. And after that, no matter what, I’m done,’” she said.

Cebula, 26, made it, and will be one of two New Yorkers headed to Paris with the 12-person U.S. Olympic Women’s Fencing Team, competing in both individual and group epee events. The Bensonhurst native is currently ranked No. 2 in the U.S. and No. 27 worldwide in her discipline.

Foilist Lauren Scruggs of Ozone Park, is also on the Olympic fencing team. Scruggs, 21 and a junior at Harvard , makes her way to the world’s biggest sport stage ranked No. 12 worldwide in her discipline. She is one of two African-Americans — male or female — to have won an individual world fencing title, according to U.S.A. Fencing.

Scruggs never dreamt of being an Olympic fencer and came to the sport by way of a lightsaber obsession. Her older brother, Nolen Scruggs, picked up the sport because he was a huge Star Wars fan, she said, and she was soon enrolled in the same fencing club as him.

Watching her fencing heroes compete on the big screen “was always super exciting to me,” she said in a phone interview Monday. “So to think that, like, that’s going to be me — it’s kind of crazy.”

As for Cebula, she spoke with THE CITY from Lima, Peru, two days after winning the bronze medal at the 2024 Pan-American Fencing Championships, the final competition before the Olympics.

It’s an unlikely path that began in earnest when Cebula, the daughter of immigrants from Poland, was a freshman at Brooklyn Tech High School and enrolled in the school’s fencing club, picking up her epee for the very first time.

But her interest in fencing began years earlier, when she watched on TV as U.S. men’s sabre Keeth Smart — a fellow Brooklynite and Brooklyn Tech alum — defeated five-time world champion Stanislav Pozdnyakov of Russia at the Beijing 2008 Olympics. (Smart would go on to win a silver medal that year.)

Smart’s thrilling come-from-behind win was the first time Cebula, then 10 years old, had ever seen fencing.

“It was the most beautiful thing I’d ever seen in my life,” she said from her hotel room in Lima last month.

Smart and Cebula have not met, but he told THE CITY that he has followed her fencing career since she was at Brooklyn Tech. “It really means a lot and, candidly, I’m just so honored that Anne thinks of me as her inspiration for fencing.”

While New York is considered a mecca for fencing, private lessons were more than what her mother, a nurse, and her father, an electrician with IBEW Local 3, could afford. But Cebula never let go of the idea, and when choosing between two public high schools she went with Brooklyn Tech because of the school’s free fencing club. She picked up her epee sword for the first time at 14, years later than most elite athletes.

Of those early training sessions, Cebula remembered that Brooklyn Tech coach Bert Yaged did not open the club’s equipment closet until nearly the end of the school year, instead pushing students to strengthen their endurance and footwork by running from the school’s seventh floor cafeteria to the ground floor over and over again. (Cebula is just one of several Olympic fencers who have trained under Yaged at Brooklyn Tech, a club that includes Smart and his sister, silver medalist Erinn Smart .)

“She was the tallest girl on the team,” Yaged, who has taught at Brooklyn Tech on and off since the 1970s, said of Cebula. “She was really outstanding, a very good athlete, someone I didn’t have to watch all of the time.”

To prepare for Paris, Cebula quit her day job as a receptionist to train five days a week, four to five hours a day, at four different clubs in the city and Port Washington, L.I., while continuing to model. Meanwhile, Scruggs is an intern at a wealth management firm in Manhattan, and trains for several hours a day after work at Fencers Club, under her coach and stepfather, Sean McClain .

“Nothing too crazy,” said Scruggs of her Olympic training schedule. “I got this far doing what I’m doing.”

Smart knows Scruggs through her involvement with the Peter Westbrook Foundation , a Manhattan-based club where children and teens from under-represented groups can learn fencing. As there are more demands for young people’s time, whether it’s social media or academics, Scruggs provides a positive example of someone who “has risen through the ranks” to become a champion, said Smart.

“I think what makes her story really incredible, and probably hasn’t been given enough attention,” he said, “is that Lauren is an Olympian… while also a full-time student at Harvard. Most Olympians take the year off in fencing, whether it’s from their job or academics. She made the Olympic team while studying at one of the hardest universities in the country — like just absolutely incredible.”

During the school year, Scruggs competes with Harvard’s women’s foil team, where she has won national and world titles. She is the first U.S foil fencer in history to ever win back-to-back gold world championship titles, according to U.S.A. Fencing.

Cebula still lives in Bensonhurst with her parents and rides the train to her sessions, just like she did as a student at Brooklyn Tech and Barnard.

“Fencing changed my life forever. I’ve had so many great things happen because of the sport,” said a visibly emotional Cebula in a video call. “And there are probably so many kids out there that probably don’t have the means to get into this sport or even know it exists, and I really want to pass that on to kids in the city. There is so much untapped potential.”

Smart, 45, will be in Paris — his first time at the Olympics since the 2008 Beijing games — to cheer on Cebula, Scruggs and the rest of the U.S. national team.

Scruggs will compete in her first Olympic event in the individual women’s foil on July 28, and Cebula in the individual women’s epee on July 27. Her family, she said, will be there to see her.

“It’s emotional,” said Cebula. “It’s the first time they’ve been on vacation in many, many years.”

THE CITY is a nonprofit newsroom that serves the people of New York. Sign up for our SCOOP newsletter and get exclusive stories, helpful tips, a guide to low-cost events, and everything you need to know to be a well-informed New Yorker. DONATE to THE CITY

The post En Garde: Two New York Olympic Fencers Are on The Path to Paris appeared first on THE CITY - NYC News .