Undefeated After First Round of Ivies, Lions Potential Fencing Champions

After the first four rounds of the Ivy Championships, the Columbia fencing team is perfect. The women sit at 3-0, and the men 2-0 heading into next weekend’s Ivy Championships South at Princeton, where they will face rival Harvard to battle for the title.

The Lions began the meet in the second round where the women took on Cornell. The Big Red does not have a men’s squad. The Light Blue dominated the match 23-4. For Columbia, the Cornell bout was a tune-up for the more difficult matches that the Lions would face in the third and fourth rounds against Penn and Princeton, respectively.

Against the Quakers, Columbia’s women continued their success with a 20-7 victory, and the men got their Ivy title defense off to a positive start with a 15-12 victory. Penn took the foil category, its strongest weapon, by a 5-4 score, and the Lions won the épeé weapon with a similar 5-4 score. In the decisive sabre discipline, senior co-captain Alex Diacou went a perfect 3-0, and Jeff Spear scored two victories as Columbia went on to win 6-3.

The Light Blue would soon be thanking the Quakers. In the next round of competition, Penn defeated the Crimson men and women in the upset of the round-robin tournament. With at least one loss for each Harvard team and matches against traditional bottom-feeders Brown and Yale next week, the Lions are guaranteed a share of the Ivy crown even if they fall to the Crimson—a similar scenario as that of last season.

In what was the final match of the day, Columbia dominated what was supposed to be one of Princeton’s best teams in recent years, 21-6 in the men’s competition and 19-8 on the women’s side. The Tigers never got on track against the Lion men in any of the three disciplines, while the Columbia women’s team continued to show why it is considered one of the best groups in the nation.

While individual results for the Princeton dual were unavailable at the time of press, Columbia’s women’s freshmen class showed why it were so highly touted coming into this season. Through three rounds, Nicole Ross and Martyna Urbanowicz were 6-0, while Jackie Jacobson and Abby Caparros went 4-2. The combined 20-4 record was the best of any freshman group of the Ivy teams through the first three rounds of competition.

Having passed their first three tests and having received help from an unlikely source the Lions will emerge as undisputed Ivy champions in both men’s and women’s fencing for the first time since 2003 if they deliver a similar performance next weekend.