Where Olympic Dreams Are Born

Competition, Discipline, and The Art Of Swordsmanship On Display At Cheyenne Fencing Academy

Story and photos by Cara DeGette Editor, GPHN

On East Colfax, between a Hertz rental car lot and a smoke shop, is a storefront decorated with silhouettes of swordsmen.

Inside, a dozen or so fencers-in-training sit on the floor. They are watching as two other, more experienced students take turns demonstrating the art of fencing. The young athletes lunge and parry and feint with Coach Conrad Garcia.

“Who likes to fish?” Garcia asks. Hands go up.

“And when you catch the fish, why do you catch the fish?” he continues. “In fencing, the opponent is the fish, and your sword is the lure. OK, I am the fish now.” En garde! Ready! Fence.

Celine Davis, 9, lunges and jabs. Her sword touches Conrad.

“She fished me, and now she’s gonna cook me up and eat me,” explains Garcia, a former international competitor originally from Guatemala.

Elaine Cheris, owner of the Cheyenne Fencing and Pentathlon Center, is standing nearby. She is talking about the stuff it takes to be a competitive athlete: “How many of you want to go to the Olympics?” Cheris calls out? Every hand goes up. “How many of you want to participate in the Olympics?” All hands go up but one.

“You can see it in their eyes; they just light up,” says Cheris. “You only go to the Olympics if you can’t not do it.”

These young students aren’t headed to Rio de Janeiro this month for the 2016 games. For many of them, it’s only their first week learning a new sport. But already, their minds are looking toward 2020, 2024 and beyond. This fencing and pentathlon academy, at Colfax and Ivy, happens to be where their Olympic dreams are born and nurtured. It’s where they’re learning the discipline of training and competition.

Jenna Kelly started fencing after Cheris – a two-time Olympian and former world champion – came to her school to demonstrate the sport. For Kelly, the appeal is irresistible. It’s part Lord of the Rings, part competitive spirit, with an emphasis on loyalty, and always, respect for your opponent.

Eventually, Cheris asked Kelly, now 11, does she also likes to swim, and ride horseback, and run? Would she like to shoot? Yes, yes, yes and yes. Kelly is now training as a pentathlete, which combines all those sports. Her goal? The Olympics, of course. Either 2020 or 2024.

“I just try to do my best, and keep beating my time,” she said.

Celine Davis, also a pentathlete in training, also has an eye toward the gold, in 2024. Like Kelly, Davis started out fencing. Cheris points at Davis: “The only way that one will not make it to the Olympics, is if she trips and falls and breaks her leg on her way to get on the airplane to get there.”

By the way, Cheris is convinced that all fencers are really uncoordinated. Her theory: they use up all their coordination and focus on the fencing strip, and have none left over for the rest of the day.

Athletes at work

The academy is a big open space filled with the chaos of young athletes at work. There are also sofas for sitting, four mismatched dogs for petting, and two tropical macaws on a perch. There are rabbits in hutches. Out back, in an enclosed alleyway, chickens scratch around, laying eggs and doing what chickens do.

Inside, Cheris smiles for a photograph, sitting next to the poster from the 1912 games in Stockholm. “Yes, that was my first Olympic game,” she jokes.

Cheris didn’t start fencing until she was 29. She was a national champion at age 54.

But she always had the Olympics in mind. Her first love was track. In her 20s she competed on the men’s track team at Troy State in Alabama. She later moved to Yale to teach swimming. Another athletic director started a fencing program at the university, and asked Cheris for her help in promoting it. Then he asked her to take a lesson. Her response: Certainly not. I am not going to hit someone with a sword.

One and a half months later he asked again. Her response? “Thank you very much. And no.”

One day, she said, he tricked her. Cheris was wearing a long leather skirt, and high heels. He got a sword in her hand anyway, and away she went. Some time later, the director and coach sat her down for a serious conversation about her talent, and potential. “Do you want to train for the 1980 Moscow Olympics?” he asked. The only word I really heard,” she says, “was the word ‘Olympics.’ ”

She worked, she qualified, and made the team. Two weeks before the games, the United States announced it would boycott, over the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. There was only one word to describe the feeling, Cheris said: Devastating.

“It was worse than you could imagine. You do your job, you make the team. And then you can’t go. What would you do?”

Four years later, in 1984, Cheris did not make the Olympic team. She was again, devastated. She was also, she says, “determined to conquer the situation.” At the 1988 games in Seoul, South Korea, she was a member of the team that finished sixth, at the time the highest ever for women fencers from the United States. She had given it her all. “We were very, very, very close to getting a medal. You’re like, shoot, but how do we get better? How do we get better?

In 1996, at age 50 and in amazing physical and mental condition, Cheris was the oldest American to compete in the games in Atlanta. She fenced well, and lost her bout by the thinnest of margins. “We don’t talk about that,” she said. Four years later, at age 54, Cheris was ranked No. 1 in the United States.

“I never really said I was done, I just slowly stopped competing,” she says.

The Jimmy Buffett story

Since opening the Cheyenne Fencing Academy, Cheris has trained thousands of fencers and pentathletes.

Her students have included national champions, and also Jimmy Buffett.  Yes, cheeseburger-in-paradise Jimmy Buffett. The musician called Cheris up one day, and wanted a lesson. Sometime later, she went to Red Rocks for one of his concerts. In the middle of a song he did a lunge, and pointed to Cheris in the crowd. “It was,” she says, “the coolest thing ever.”

So what does it take to cross the threshold from athlete to Olympian? Obsession, perseverance, a complete embrace of the challenge.

“It’s in your make-up,” Cheris says. “You can look [an Olympian] in the eyes and see them light up when they talk about it. The process, getting up every day, doing an activity that you want to get better, and better, and better. To know, ‘my goal is to do better than I did yesterday.’ ”

On a recent summer day, somewhere in the ballpark of 20 young students were warming up, doing their circuit training. They ran up and down the stairs. They did their 10 sit-ups, 10 pushups, 10 star jumps, 10 burpee-with-star jumps, 10 power jumps, 150 skips on the jump rope.

Jackson Smith, Eli Cohen, Joseph Fowler, and Isaac Tallman, rattled off the appeals of fencing: You have to be fast. You have to be agile. You have to have good hand-eye coordination. It’s about strategy. It’s about loyalty. It’s about honor. It’s about being respectful of your opponents.

“Fencing helps with all sports,” Cohen said.

“Really, it helps with all things in life,” Smith added.

Fencing is sometimes called the physical equivalent of chess. Sophia Ginosar, now 13, says she started fencing two years ago. “I needed a physical activity, instead of sitting around reading all day.”

Gabriel Innerst, who is 15, points out the obvious: “Really, what kid doesn’t want to sword fight?”

Ariana Auster says she got interested in fencing when she was in second grade a few years ago, when Cheris did a fencing demonstration at her school. Auster asked her mom if she could take lessons. Her mom said yes, of course. She could try anything. Now Auster’s little brother is also fencing.

Their mom, Alison Auster, says she’s never seen anything like this school on Colfax.

“What they’re learning in here is sportsmanship and character,” Auster says. “I don’t care if they are teaching them how to basket weave, this is where I want my kids to be.”