Rudnicki Perseveres Despite Injuries

Alex Rudnicki knew that something was wrong. His right arm dangling at his side was proof enough of that.

It was the result of a move backwards to avoid a touch in his match against Harvard’s Scott DiGiulio. Despite his best effort, Rudnicki was unable to dodge the blade of DiGiulio’s saber, and the first point of the match went to the Crimson. The move did succeed, however, in completely dislocating Rudnicki’s right shoulder.

With the point decided, Rudnicki retired to his end of the strip in obvious pain, unsure of what had happened. But it didn’t take long for the junior saberist to decide that he wasn’t going to retire, at least not in the middle of the Ivy League Championships. So after a few seconds of deliberation, Rudnicki simply popped his shoulder back into place and rejoined the fray.

He proceeded to win the match by a score of 5-4.

“At the time, I didn’t really feel it,” Rudnicki said. “I couldn’t feel my fingers, but I trusted my hand was doing the right action.”

“The trainer [Jim Gossett] actually looked at it later,” he added, “and said there was no reason for it to happen, that it was a freak accident.”

Chance, it seems, has been a large part of Rudnicki’s fencing career. As a child, Rudnicki, unlike a majority of competitive fencers, had no connection to the sport. But that all changed one day at the age of nine when, while playing indoor soccer in a gym, he stumbled across a group of fencers sparring in a nearby room. From that moment on, Rudnicki was hooked.

“It was just something that I saw and thought would be fun to try,” he said.

It didn’t take long for Rudnicki to discover that he had some talent in the sport. His first coach, a former Polish national fencer named Janusz Mlynek, pushed Rudnicki hard to learn and develop. By age 10, Rudnicki was competing in national tournaments—a big step for someone who, a year prior, had never held a fencing sword in his hand. Luckily for Rudnicki, his own inexperience in the sport didn’t hamper him in his age group.

“My first tournament, I came in fifth,” Rudnicki said. “I had no idea what was going on, and I thought that, if I’m pretty good for being this young, I might as well keep going.”

Rudnicki continued with his newfound hobby, climbing the rankings and earning accolades in the under-17 and under-20 levels. The opportunity to come to Columbia, though, came about not through Rudnicki’s prowess with the saber, but through a broken ankle and a second career.

“I broke my ankle in eighth grade and I still had to go [to a national tournament] because my family was going,” Rudnicki said, “so I just decided to referee because I knew enough about fencing at the time that I could judge it. I actually refereed on crutches.”

Rudnicki had been looking for a college with an engineering school and a fencing program. After a chance meeting with Columbia head coach George Kolombatovich at a national tournament that Rudnicki was refereeing, the New Jersey native made his choice.

“I got to talking to him about schools, and that’s how it came to be,” Rudnicki said.

Now in his third year with the team, Rudnicki has become one of the squad’s most dependable members. The junior boasted an impressive 27-12 record in his sophomore year, earning him Second Team All-Ivy honors, a feat he repeated this season. That included an 11-4 mark at the league tournament, blemished only by a 0-3 finish against conference champion Penn in the first part of the championships. It was part of an all-around disappointing performance for the men’s team against the Quakers, a let down that Rudnicki admits still bothers him.

“It’s disappointing,” he said. “I take blame. I didn’t wake up for that match against Penn. They just jumped on us. They came out ready and just overwhelmed us. They wanted it more.”

There is still a chance that Columbia could face off against Penn once more this season, this time on the national level at the NCAA Championships in two weeks. But though Rudnicki is positive about the Light Blue’s chances, he still feels hampered by his multitude of injuries this year. The junior fractured his foot at the start of the season and then sprained his right ankle soon afterwards. Even his separated shoulder still bothers him almost a month later—resetting the shoulder himself and continuing with the match, Rudnicki says, was “a terrible decision because it’s been hurting for a while and I still don’t have the same mobility.”

Regardless of how this season turns out, Rudnicki is, in some ways, already looking forward to life after Columbia fencing. A civil engineering major, Rudnicki has thrown himself into his work; he even admits that his personal interest in fencing has waned over time as he begins to formulate his career plans. Rudnicki is undecided about how far he’ll go with fencing, but says that he’d like to try his hand at coaching.

For now, however, Rudnicki continues to train, both for the NCAAs and for the tournaments he will take part in over the summer. Foremost on his mind is the chance for Columbia to go far against the nation’s best.

“If we’re all together, if the entire team’s together at NCAAs, I think we can win it,” Rudnicki said.

Although he’d probably like it if he didn’t handicap himself again in the process.