Eli Dershwitz | Tokyo 2020 Olympic Profile
Team USA fencer Eli Dershwitz explains how the pandemic took a toll on him and other athletes during qualifying, and shares just how excited he is to be back on the strip competing again.
Video Transcript
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ELI DERSHWITZ: I'm 25 years old. I'm from Boston, Massachusetts. Rio 2016 was my first Olympic Games after my freshman year of college. I'm really looking forward towards Tokyo this summer. You know, it's five more years of training under my belt. I graduated from Harvard in 2019. And I'm just really excited to be able to compete this summer, you know, with the rest of my Team USA athletes.
It all happened so fast. I remember I qualified for the Tokyo Olympic Games on March 7, 2020, on my mom's birthday. Got to call her from Europe, tell her all the good news. You know, was training so hard at that point and then, you know, a week or two later with Tokyo getting postponed like an entire year, it was definitely tough on a lot of, you know, on myself, on my teammates, a lot of our training partners that were really working together for so long.
We all had to take a huge break. But since then, you know, I'm so proud about, you know, having this great community of teammates and other people training around me, that I think it's been a lot easier for all of us to [? group ?] together and decide that we're going to push through all these obstacles when it comes to new tournaments, new, like, new pieces of information that we're getting every day towards Tokyo. So honestly, I'm just so thankful that I had such a good training group around me that's like being able to jump over these hurdles over the last year.
