How 15-year-old fencer Jessica Guo became an Olympic medal hopeful

Jessica Guo spent much of this past year the same way many other high school students did: at home, navigating the challenges of online learning.

“A lot of people hate it, but I think I’m one of them that loves it because you kind of get your free time in between classes, you have a break,” Guo told Sportsnet before the end of the school term. “When you’re at school, you have to kind of go from one classroom to another. Now it’s just free time so I can work on anything else that I have.”

Of course, in Guo’s case, “anything else” includes training for the Olympic Games.

In Tokyo, 17 months after she first secured her Olympic berth, Guo will take on the world’s finest fencers in both the individual and team foil events. At just 15 years old, the Toronto teen is already Canada’s top-ranked fencer in her discipline and one of the country’s best shots at a podium finish in a sport in which it’s never medalled.

Fencing began as a family affair for Guo, whose father, brother and sister are also avid fencers, having been introduced to the sport through a family friend.

“I think what really hooked me was because it’s kind of a one-on-one person sport and it’s a very competitive sport,” she said.

Guo started competing at age nine, and just two years later she was already on the Team Canada radar after national team coach Paul ApSimon saw her sparring ahead of the Pan Am Junior Championship back in 2017, helping warm up fencers competing at the event.

“I didn’t know who she was, but by the end of the warmup session, I was surprised that she was having a lot of success against all the eventual medalists at the tournament,” reflected ApSimon. “As an 11-year-old, she was winning against them in the warm-up. So that was when I sort of saw all the potential that she had.”

Guo wasn’t yet old enough to fence in international events — 13 is the minimum age for the international competition circuit — but was quickly brought into the fold for various training camps and other sessions, including an international camp in Paris and accompanying Team Canada at the World Championship in China.

“I remember a match in China, in training, I watched her fence against the Olympic champion and I couldn’t tell who the stronger fencer was,” ApSimon said. “That’s where we knew that she had that drive and she had the confidence to fence against anybody.”

Four years later, Guo is about to be an Olympian herself and sits ranked 15th worldwide thanks to an already impressive resumé.

In November 2018, five months after her 13th birthday, Guo competed in her first senior World Cup event and finished 21st overall after advancing past the preliminary grouping and into the round of 32. The following year brought more experience at the senior level — a 13th-place finish in individual foil and sixth in the team event at her first-ever International Fencing Federation World Championship — as well as a pair of silver medals at each of the Pan Am Championship and Pan Am Games in the same events.

In addition to competing at the senior level (13-plus), Guo is also currently still eligible to compete at the cadet (U17) and junior (U20) levels, where just this year she earned World Championship bronze in junior foil and gold at the cadet level — her first competitions since COVID-19 brought everything to a halt in 2020.

#Cairo2021 Jessica Zi Jia Guo is the new World Champion in cadet women's foil #fencing #worldchampionships #Egypt @FencingCanada pic.twitter.com/zvMAqND802

— FIE (@FIE_fencing) April 7, 2021

ApSimon and Canadian Fencing Federation executive director David Howes are in agreement that to have the kind of success Guo is having at such a young age is nearly unheard of.

“For us, it’s definitely rare,” said Howes. “For her to be selected to the Olympic team at her age, I think is unheard of. And winning two medals at a world championship has never been done by Canada before.”

ApSimon noted Guo’s tactical skillset is “years ahead of her age.”

“She understands fencing. She has a feel for how to trap her opponents. She has a feel for getting an understanding of what her opponents are trying to do and then she’s able to either trap them into that type of game or just avoid it altogether,” he explained.

A sport as historic as the Games themselves, fencing presents a unique combination of physicality — nimble footwork, endurance, quick strikes — and mental strategy.

“During the bout, there’s a lot of tactic change, and you have to adapt,” said Guo. “I really like that because it makes you think. You’re kind of putting a lot of mind into it.”

Howes said fencing is often equated to “playing chess while running.”

“You’ve got to be thinking a few moves ahead while you’re moving and while the other person is planning their thing as well,” he said.

While every fencer has her own style, she must be able to adapt on the fly to best solve her opponent. Points are scored by hitting an opponent with the end of the weapon within the target area of the torso (chest, stomach, and back).

“I think it comes with a lot of practice and competition. There’s so much that you kind of get a feel for,” Guo says. “So, it’s so much easier to anticipate what they’re going to do, because first of all, you’ve competed with this one person for so long and you know them, but also it just comes naturally…. You just know it’s coming.”
As for Guo’s own style?

“I do a lot of attacks and there’s a lot of movement. I do a lot of footwork and then I usually do [something] timing-wise, where I like I counter-attack and then I mix it up,” Guo says.

Guo’s early success and trajectory is reminiscent of that of Lee Kiefer, the top-ranked women’s fencer for Team USA. Kiefer was 18 when she first competed at the Olympic Games back in 2012. She’s won Pan Am gold every year since 2010, has landed on the World Championship podium four times, and on the World Cup podium 13 times.

Guo looks up to Kiefer. She even beat her U.S. idol in a few fencing bouts — though she humbly does not flaunt that fact — and admires Kiefer not just for her success in the sport but her pursuits outside of it.

“I’ve just looked up to her forever. She’s really nice, first of all. She’s very kind. And also, she’s in med school right now, which is what I want to do,” says Guo, who plans to pursue anesthesiology. “I find it really cool how she’s able to balance like competitive fencing with med school for so many years.”

“[Kiefer] was starting to have success when she was 15 and 16 years old. So, Jessica’s on that same track,” said ApSimon. “Now the challenge is to continue to push her to progress — and oftentimes that’s the challenge when you have success very young, is to continue the work in the day-to-day to make yourself the best in the world.”

En garde and ready for Tokyo 2020 #TeamCanada will have its largest Olympic fencing team since Beijing 2008, made up of men + women

Get into the details https://t.co/NxK4yXZUtT pic.twitter.com/Tfu7wm3yrR

— Team Canada (@TeamCanada) May 20, 2021

This summer’s Games will be unlike any other in history, with athletes bubbled up and events being run without fans, but the end goal remains the same as ever.

“I visualize myself on the podium,” Guo said, looking ahead to her debut. “I’m hoping that I do get a medal, or a team medal because our team is working towards a medal.

“I want to see my team on the medal podium together and smiling. That would be great. I would cry!”

Howes believes a podium finish for Guo is “definitely within her grasp.”

“We have pretty high hopes for someone on that team to break through and get an individual medal. And the team is well positioned as well,” said Howes. The Canadian women’s national foil team goes into the Games ranked sixth in the world. “They’ve been knocking on the door of the top four for the last couple of years.”

Beyond the Games, Howes sees an extremely bright future for Guo and Canadian fencing.

“At only 15 years old, she has a lot of years of international competition ahead of her, so it’s very exciting to look even beyond this Olympics to see what she could possibly accomplish,” Howes said. “She is already becoming a role model in Canadian fencing for fencers her age and younger, and this is what we need. We need young athletes like her that other athletes can look up to and say, ‘Wow, I want to do the same thing as Jessica someday.’

“And we’re very excited as well that it’s a woman doing it,” Howes continued. “To have a young woman be the face of Canadian fencing, it’s very exciting and very positive.”

[relatedlinks]