Eliza Stone vows to keep fencing after a tough Olympics — and difficult attempts to train during the pandemic: ‘It was a very, very long road to get here’
TOKYO — Nothing has been easy for Chicago’s Eliza Stone in the past year — including these Olympics.
She lost in an early round of the women’s individual sabre competition earlier this week, then finished sixth Saturday in the women’s team event.
But after spending the last nine years working toward qualifying for the Games and finding a way to train during the pandemic, she quickly put the disappointing placements into perspective.
“The fact that I made the Olympics is wonderful,” she said. “Obviously, I wish I could have done more but that doesn’t change every single thing I did along the way.”
Stone was on the cusp of qualifying for the U.S. team in March 2020, when COVID-19 led to the Games being postponed and her training facility at Princeton being shut down. In the early days of the pandemic, she tried to keep in shape at home by running in her backyard and doing footwork drills in the driveway.
Desperate for a training partner, she taped a cardboard box to the living room wall and practiced her blade work with it. She sliced the ceiling a couple times as she fenced with her corrugated opponent and still isn’t sure how she’ll explain the marks when she moves out.
As the country began to reopen, New Jersey and Princeton both maintained their COVID-19 restrictions longer than other communities. The university’s training centers remained closed during the fall, forcing Stone to look for training opportunities elsewhere. She found willing partners at three clubs in the New York-New Jersey area and spent hours driving to them.
“I spread myself out and got whatever training was available on whatever day it was available,” she told the Chicago Tribune before the Games. “I got creative. I hustled and drove a lot.”
Her pandemic fencing partners did not have the pedigrees she was used to training against, but Stone didn’t care.
“I was happy to be with anyone who would let me fence for the first few months,” she said. “Anything to let me move around was great. I just needed to move.”
After failing to make the team in 2016, Stone considered stepping away from the sport because her longtime coach retired. She decided to stick around for another four-year Olympic cycle, not knowing that it would be stretched a year longer.
She didn’t have money to hire her new coach, Oleg Stetsiv, who oversees the women’s fencing program at Princeton, but they worked out an agreement. Stone, who graduated from the university in 2013 with a political theory degree, gives him a portion of whatever prize money she wins and she helps out with his team.
In 2020, however, there wasn’t much of an opportunity to do either and it took a toll. Stone sought help from a sports psychologist to deal with the strain and uncertainty.
“It has been mentally exhausting,” she said before the Games. “Sometimes I just needed someone else to talk to about the pressure of it all.”
Stone, 30, plans to go to medical school next year and begin another chapter. A few days after arriving in Tokyo, she told the Tribune she would stick with the sport if she could find a way to both study and compete at a world-class level.
In her final match, a nagging hamstring injury caused a noticeable limp, which she shrugged off. She talked about taking a brief break to recover — physically and emotionally — and then getting back to training.
“It was a very, very long road to get here,” she said. “It was never about winning or losing along the way. It was about fencing as hard as I could every step of the way. I did that and now I’m just going to keep working.”
