Taken from a Columbia website. link at bottom.
Men's Fencing Falls Victim To Equipment Failure, Women Beat Harvard
By Phil Wallace
Spectator Senior Staff Writer
If the Columbia men's fencing team wants to win its third straight Ivy title, it will likely have to share the trophy.
In one of the lower days in recent Light Blue fencing history, the Columbia men (0-1) fell 14-13 to a rising Harvard program. It was the team's first loss to the Crimson in over 25 years.
The women's team (1-0) was able to stave off Harvard (0-1), winning a wild 15-12 match that saw its epée team sweep the Crimson 9-0 and its foil team get swept 9-0.
Afterward though, the talk was not so much about the men's loss or the women's victory but about equipment and administrative problems that hampered the Lions on Sunday.
Columbia has not yet received its annual shipment of fencing supplies, forcing the team to use last year's used equipment. Much of that equipment is damaged or non-functional due to regular fencing wear and tear. The result was a team that needed to share weapons, body cords, and other gear. Several fencers entered the meet with only one or no functional weapon instead of the standard three weapons.
"It's never a good feeling when you only come to a meet with one blade," co-captain Kevin Eriksen said, who was one of those fencers with less equipment than standard.
Additionally, none of the first-year fencers were cleared to compete by the NCAA Clearinghouse until late Friday afternoon, leading to some uncertainty in preparations during the week.
"Everyone who needed to be cleared eventually got cleared," junior epéeist Michael Dreyfus said. "It didn't really affect us, but it was on our minds."
Junior epéeist Michael Yablon was among those most affected by the equipment problems. He came to meet with only one adequate epée and two other epées that he described as "terrible" with low-quality blades. Yablon had tested all three the day before, and all were fully functional. However, a screw became loose on the final touch of his second bout--a 5-3 victory over Harvard's Michael Soto.
Yablon was not aware of the problem and did not test his equipment prior to his match with Harvard's nationally-ranked fencer Julian Rose. Yablon and Rose faced off in the final bout of the day with the score tied 13-13, and Yablon immediately had to start the bout down 2-0. This was because Yablon came to the strip with his epée that was missing a screw, and the director gave him a yellow card warning. Yablon then turned to one of his backup weapons, and that one failed to work. He was red carded, and Rose was awarded a point. Yablon's second backup weapon was also broken, and he received a second red card. The match had to be stopped for several minutes while Yablon's primary epee was repaired so that he could even fence Rose with a two-touch deficit. Rose won the bout 5-1.
"We're supposed to get equipment early in the season," Yablon said. "I take responsibility for not checking if the screw was in my tip, and I don't want to pin our loss on the athletic department, but they do so little for us that when it comes to something they are supposed to do and it's not done, it's frustrating."
Apparently, there were several bureaucratic mistakes that resulted in the equipment not arriving. Among the most egregious was Columbia's failure to pay Blue Gauntlet Fencing Gear for last year's shipment, a problem that was only discovered in recent weeks. Blue Gauntlet had refused to send this year's supply until Columbia's bill was paid. Co-Head Coach George Kolombatovich notified the captains of the reason for the team's absent new equipment last Friday. However, Kolombatovich would not comment specifically on the athletic department mixup.
"There were some administrative problems that I will take responsibility for, but it is no individual's fault," Kolombatovich said. "We lost the meet because Harvard was better than us today. All the rest is garbage."
As for the men's matches, the saber team won 5-4 thanks largely to a 3-0 performance by sophomore Paul Reyfman. The first-time starter drew attention by defeating two national top-10 fencers, Tim Hagamen and David Jakus.
The men's foil and epee teams both dropped 5-4 matches to Harvard. Sophomore foilist Nico Jaspers headlined that group by going 3-0 with wins over the Crimson trio of Jon Carter, Phil Sherrill, and Ben Schmidt.
The foil team sorely missed sophomore star Jeremy Sinkin who was fencing in a World Cup in Madrid this weekend. Sinkin had not planned to miss the Harvard meet, because it was originally scheduled for early December. However, after the meet was moved up to yesterday, Sinkin could not change his plans to go to Madrid.
"Harvard has a very strong team, but the team did a very good job. If Sinkin would have been here, it would have been opposite result," Co-Head Coach Aladar Kogler said.
Also in a World Cup in Italy was first-year Emma Baratta, who had the same conflict with the change in schedule as Sinkin. The Lions were able to pull their weight without Baratta in women's saber though. In fact, the Columbia women's 15-12 victory was largely due to the vast improvement in the depth of the saber squad.
First-year sabreur Veronica Padula made her sizzling Light Blue debut with a 3-0 sweep of the Crimson. Senior Annemarie Gallagher also stepped up, going 2-1 on the day.
"We had high quality saber. The girls did a good job," Kogler said. The women's epée squad had a banner day, going 9-0 with their trio of senior co-captain Monica Conley, junior Kim Bush, and sophomore Solmaz Firoz. The clean sweep by epée completely offset the struggles of the women's foil squad that went 0-9.
"It's a good step toward the Ivy rank," Bush said. "It was a good feeling to have epée come out strong. We're really melding together and coming together as a squad."
"I'm a little disappointed," Blount said of the women's foil team. "There was a lot of pressure; it was just a really difficult day. I thought we could have stepped it up."
The women remain in the hunt for the Ivy title but will still need to overcome difficult challenges from Yale, Princeton, and Penn. The men, however, need some help the rest of the way.
"It was a good wake-up call for us," co-captain and sabreur Andrew Sohn said. "None of us expected it to be easy, but we hyped it up too much when we actually had the best team. They had nothing to lose. It's not our ability; it's just a bad day. Now we're looking to beat every team."
"A lot of it was mental with our squad," Eriksen said. "There were the Clearing House difficulties, there was the talk of [Harvard's] recruiting classes, we haven't lost to Harvard in 25 years, [and] we let that get to us."
"I'm not disappointed. This match, you should not cry," Kogler said. "It will be the same approach [for the rest of the season]. It will not influence them negatively. [Today] it was a knife and a gun machine."
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