Peggy Walbridge - Ivy@50

Tell Cornell's Peggy Walbridge that she is Cornell's greatest woman fencer and she's quick to disagree. "No I'm not. Grace Acel was. She was phenomenal." Indeed, Acel's accomplishments are impressive, with two national fencing championships in 1942-43. Cornell had an even earlier repeat women's national fencing champion, Elizabeth Ross, in 1930-31. Karen Denton also reigned as national champion in 1968.

"In the 1960s Cornell had a very good team," explains Walbridge. "[Michel] Sebastiani (the recently-retired Princeton coach, then Cornell's coach) was responsible for making Cornell's teams so strong."

Walbridge benefited from the growing strength of Cornell's program, for she did not fence competitively in high school. "I went to an all-girls school," she remembers, "and played on any and every team that I could get on." But there was no fencing team, and Walbridge chose Cornell "because it would be the biggest challenge for me personally, and it had a very strong liberal arts college." Fencing was not a factor.

Her initiation to Cornell fencing was inauspicious. "I was horrible, laughable freshman year, won very few bouts," she says. But by sophomore year Walbridge, and her team, hit its stride. "Our team flattened just about everyone we fenced," she says. "We won every team match our sophomore to senior seasons, by scored of 15-1, 16-0. The least we won was by 12-4." The Cornell women's fencing team won the 1972-73 national championships, and barely lost the 1974 title.

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Mary Jane O'Neill - Ivy@50

The Lajos Csiszar women's fencing trophy, awarded to the Ivy League's women's champion team, is modeled on Penn Athletic Hall of Famer and two-time Olympian Mary Jane O'Neill. "The trophy was donated by a Penn alum," O'Neill modestly recalls, "and I was picked as the most notorious Penn fencer."

She was at Harvard Medical School at the time and the sculptor, Timothy Maslin, went to her in Boston. "He did two or three sessions," she says, "and made me stay in a lunge position for 10 minutes at a time, which is as long as I could stand."

Initiated into fencing as a junior at Concord-Carlisle High School in Massachusetts, O'Neill joined an illustrious program. Though she took to the sport right away she fenced in the shadow of younger teammate Caitlin Bilodeau, who won two junior national championships before moving on to Columbia University.

The two met again in college -- with O'Neill winning the NCAA individual title in 1984 while Bilodeau took it in 1985 and 1987. Incredibly, the two fencers followed another Concord-Carlisle grad, Columbia Hall of Famer Lisa Piazza.

Bilodeau and O'Neill were reunited at the 1988 and 1992 Olympics, when they fenced on the foil squad. "Our teams did well," remembers O'Neill. "I like team competition even though mine is an individual sport."

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Maya Lawrence - Ivy@50

Maya Lawrence is in Europe, working as an "assistante d'angalis" at a lycee (fix) (high school) in Paris, through a program administered by the French Embassy in Washington, D.C. She's also training with some of the world's best fencers in preparation for the 2008 Olympics in Beijing, China.

It's a hard path -- competing on a world-class level in preparation for the Olympics, while beginning as a teacher of English as a second language. And Lawrence could have picked an easier venue for this training. When she arrived in France in September 2005 she "didn't know the language. If you start [speaking] in English they get mad at you," she says, "but if you try first in French they're fine."

But then Lawrence is used to this dual path. Perhaps it started when she chose to attend Princeton. A native of Teaneck, N.J., she believes "almost every student in New Jersey knows about Princeton!" For her, the decision to go was because "it has a stellar academic reputation, but fencing was also a factor in my decision. It seemed natural to choose the school with the best of both worlds."

Arriving at Princeton in the fall of 1998, Lawrence immediately started her athletic and academic tracks. Fencing began slowly until long-time Princeton coach Michael Sebastiani suggested she had the potential to become a champion -- if she committed to a more rigorous training regimen that combined both conditioning and fencing fundamentals.

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Sada Jacobson - Ivy@50

At the 2004 Summer Olympic sabre competition Sada Jacobson made history. She and teammate Mariel Zagunis became the first American women to medal in fencing when she took the bronze medal and Zagunis (daughter of Penn rower and 1976 Olympian Cathy Menges Zagunis) the gold. Yet for Jacobson, the first step towards this achievement may have happened at Yale some 34 years before.

David Jacobson, Sada's father and then a freshman at Yale, "peered through the door of the fencing room," according to an account in Yale's 2000-01 Fencing Media Guide. Yale's new fencing coach, Henry Harutunian, "grabbed Jacobson and invited him into his salle (fencing room)." Jacobson became Harutunian's first All-American in 1974, and led Yale's sabre team, with Steve Blum and Edgar House, to a bronze medal in the 1974 U.S. National Championships.

Jacobson graduated, and set aside fencing as he went to medical school and settled in Atlanta, Ga., where he is an endocrinologist. At the 1996 Atlanta Olympics Harutunian, who came for the Olympics, visited and revived Jacobson's interest in fencing. Two years later Sada Jacobson tried fencing. "I'm sure I never would have become involved in the sport if he had not introduced it to me -- I just never would have thought of it," she says.

Her ascent was rapid. In 1999 she was a member of the U.S. team at the first Women's Sabre Cadet/Junior World Championship. When it came time to choose a college, the choice was pretty obvious. "I knew the Yale fight songs even as a little kid," remembers Jacobson. "I also had a relationship with Coach Harutunian and knew I would be happy fencing for him."

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Leigh Hochberg - Ivy@50

"If Brown didn't have a fencing team, I probably would have would up matriculating somewhere else."

And Leigh Hochberg's decades-long association with Brown University has brought him to the cusp of a major medical milestone -- enabling people who are paralyzed to control devices with their minds.

He's the principal investigator for a study using the BrainGate Neural Interface System on live subjects -- in this case, with patients who have lost use of their limbs -- taking place at Harvard's Massachusetts General Hospital. The BrainGate system is a 4mm square (baby aspirin-sized) semiconductor implanted into the patient's motor cortex, the part of the brain that normally controls movement. It then sends motor cortex signals to an outside processor, which translates the signals into computer directives. "The first person [with the implant] controlled a TV, opened simulated email, and transported a piece of candy to someone's hand with a robotic arm," says Hochberg.

For Hochberg, the journey to this achievement started while he was a Brown undergraduate. "My first undergraduate neural science course was with John Donoghue," remembers Hochberg. The association continues to this day, for Dr. Donoghue is the co-founder and Chief Scientific Officer of Cyberkinetics Neurotechnology Systems, the maker of the BrainGate implant. Hochberg soon found a career path. "The neuroscience laboratory course in my junior year was when I realized that science could be part of a future career," he says.

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Bob Cottingham - Ivy@50

When Bob Cottingham arrived as a freshman sabre fencer in 1984, Columbia fencing had not won a NCAA title since 1971. When he graduated in 1988, the program just won its second straight championship and would go on to win five titles in seven years.

Cottingham was key to the revival of this elite program.

Growing up in Orange, New Jersey, he "played football and lacrosse, which is my favorite sport," he says. "I can also remember watching other athletes on television in the Olympics." He would soon join those athletes on the Olympic stage.

Cottingham began fencing at Montclair Kimberley Academy under Columbia grad Carmen Marnell and was named all-state. When it came time to pick a college, he knew where he wanted to be -- New York City. "Lots of powerhouse fencing comes out of New York, lots of opportunities for good bouting," he explains. "I wanted to be fencing against the best fencers in the country." He chose Columbia because it had "the best fit for my personality. I felt good about the school and the academics."

Cottingham settled into a routine of academics and fencing, at Columbia and at the other clubs -- Fencers Club and New York Athletic Club -- downtown. Founded in the nineteenth century, both clubs have long been an implicit of Columbia fencing, with fencers and coaches gravitating to the clubs, where many of the world's best train.

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Tamir Bloom - Ivy@50

Penn graduate Tamir Bloom's fencing career ended in the second round of the 2000 Olympics in Sydney, Australia. It had been a tough road to get to these, his second Olympics, and he felt good about his result, though he would have preferred a better finish.

Bloom had taken a year off from Mount Sinai Medical School, where he was preparing for a residency in orthopedic surgery, to train for the Olympics. Then in an ironic twist, he had become an orthopedic patient himself when he injured his right knee playing basketball. Bloom looks at it philosophically now, saying "some people get injured and then decide to go into orthopedics. I chose orthopedics and then got injured."

The decision facing him was not philosophical at the time. Knee surgery would have caused him to miss the Olympics, so he chose an intense physical therapy that kept his Olympic dreams alive. He found himself sponsored by the company that manufactured his knee brace, about which he had mixed feelings. "I hated that brace," he says.

To make the U.S. Olympic team a fencer must finish in the top eight at the world championships, be in the top 16 in world standings, or finish in the top two in one's geographical zone. Bloom missed the world championships, so his only chance was by finishing in the top two in geographical zone. He thus had to finish first in the U.S., and in the top two in the zone championship in Buenos Aires, Argentina. In ever competition he had to be the top American, or his Olympic dream was over. Constantly facing elimination, fighting his unstable knee all the way, Bloom was happy to be able to end his career at the Olympics, the pinnacle of his sport. The experience taught him "psychologically how important the mental aspect of sport is."

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Caitlin Bilobeau - Ivy@50

The 1983-84 Columbia fencing media guide set the bar high for freshman foil fencer Caitlin Bilodeau. "One of the most significant athletes ever to enter Columbia" it announced, which is fairly encompassing statement when one thinks about it.

After all, Lou Gehrig was a Columbia athlete, as was NFL Hall of Fame quarterback Sid Luckman and longtime NBA star Jim McMillian. Even among fencers there's six-time Olympian (and bronze medalist) Norman Armitage, and John Northrop, a superb fencer who also won the 1946 Nobel Prize in physics, among dozens of Olympians and professional athletes who were also Columbia athletes.

Of course, there were strong indicators of future greatness. Bilodeau, who comes from a family of nine children, started fencing at age 11 when "my two elder sisters were fencers and my mom gave me a dollar to go join them." She quickly blossomed as a fencer, becoming National Junior Champion twice in high school as well as a member of the U.S. team for the World University Games and the Junior World Championships. She was also a high school All-America in lacrosse and all-state player in soccer (and would play soccer her first to years at Columbia as well).

She learned about Columbia from Lisa Piazza, a friend from high school who went to Barnard and a fencing career that would later earn her induction in the Columbia Athletics Hall of Fame. Coach George Kolombatovich "let it be known through other fencers," according to Bilodeau, that "he was interested" in her coming to Columbia.

But she chose to attend Penn, after getting admitted to both schools. Then "about 8-10 days before orientation began" Bilodeau met Aladar Kogler, who had just accepted a coaching position at Columbia. "I thought 'this guy's amazing,'" she remembers, and switched to Columbia.

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