Portland fencer Magda Skarbonkiewicz taking her talents to the highest level
PORTLAND, Ore. (KOIN) -- There will be a handful of locals participating in the Olympics next month, but there is no doubt who will be the youngest of that bunch.
“I haven’t really been able to be a normal 18-year-old,” reflected Magda Skarbonkiewicz.
Most high school seniors walked across a stage in the past month. Skarbonkiewicz though has been attacking across a strip.
“This last month I went from Saudi Arabia for Junior World Championships, came back for five days, went to Korea for a week and a half, New York for an Olympic gala, Bulgaria for a week and a half for another World Cup, then back to New York for a day, then came home,” Skarbonkiewicz somehow said in a single sentence. “So it’s just chaos.”
She attended Jesuit up until her schedule forced her to go to online school for her senior year.
She finds herself now splitting her time between international flights and doing homework in coffee shops.
The pace of it all though hasn’t caught her by surprise.
She’s been fencing since she was six. Six years after she started, her dad and coach came to her with a question: Do you want to fence for fun or do you want to fence with the goal of making the 2024 Olympic Games?
“We set up a goal plan. I remember the paper dated back to 2019, 2020, of like making world teams, junior world teams, cadet teams, whatever it was,” said the fencer who specializes in the saber event. “For the most part we ended up following that plan which was pretty cool.”
Part of what made those goals a reality was Skarbonkiewicz's ability to think outside of the lines of a page, if you will.
“A lot of fencers they fence like an oil painting being painted where it’s just smooth and clean,” she said. “I would describe my fencing— instead of going forward and backward— it’s more side to side with the space I have or super-fast or running or half the time I’m flying, so more like an abstract painting.”
Skarbonkiewicz also used the word eccentric to describe her style of fencing.
But her goals for the Olympics are as grounded as they come.
“I want to go and just enjoy and not be like, ‘Oh my gosh, I have to do this,’” she said. “Because really, on the outside, I don’t have pressure. Most of the pressure comes from me because I’m so young. I’m not expecting to perform like crazy, but if I do that’d be something amazing.”