A historical perspective on CU fencing

There’s a picture hanging near the coaches’ offices in Dodge that shows the Columbia athletics staff in 1991. You won’t see M. Dianne Murphy in that one, nor the coaches Wilson, Nixon, and Jones. I’d guess that around half of the coaching staff here did not hold head-coaching positions in 1991, let alone ones at Columbia.

However, if you squint your eyes and tilt your head, you can make out a few individuals who have braved the years at Columbia. Director for Physical Education Ken Torrey is pictured. Another recognizable face is fencing head coach George Kolombatovich, who just recently led the Lions to their third straight fourth-or-better finish in the nation at the NCAA Championships just three weeks ago.

Kolombatovich could serve as the unofficial Columbia athletics historian for the number of people he’s seen come and go through the gates. The reason he’s been here so long is that he’s revived a century-old Columbia tradition of fencing dominance.

“Columbia had a great history in fencing,” he said. “Starting really over a hundred years ago ... the tradition was quite strong here for well over a century. Then they won the last one in 1974—tied—before I was here. In 1986, we won the championships for the first time, and it continued ... It started coming back again.”

Kolombatovich came onboard in 1979, and has been slowly building up Columbia’s fencing dynasty once again with the help of associate coach Aladar Kogler. Kolombatovich said he was “the person I was hoping to get here, because his knowledge and his experience. He is a phenomenal teacher. His Ph.D. is in sports psychology—I know that is one of our strongest points. Our fencers are prepared to deal in the moment for athletic success.”

Kogler has braved the years with Columbia, too. He came on to the staff in ’83—the year that Columbia started admitting women and the Columbia-Barnard Athletic Consortium began. While today it hardly seems noteworthy, the establishment of the Consortium and Columbia’s new coed policy made a huge difference for Kolombatovich’s recruiting:

“It was a big deal,” he said. “When we brought everything together, it was a much different feeling. It made it easier to recruit men, and easier to recruit women because they had more options. Whether you decide to go to CC or BC ... having the ability to select which one you wanted was tremendous for us.”

Around the time that the athletic consortium was founded, there were other gender-related cultural changes underfoot. Those of us who weren’t even born back then probably can’t imagine it, but society was not quite welcoming to female athletes at that time. Billie Jean King had broken through so many gender stereotypes for female athletes in the ’70s, but there was still a tremendous amount of forward progress necessary in the realm of athletics for women.

“One of the big changes in our society has been the emergence of the woman being accepted and applauded by society for being a successful athlete in things other than tennis,” Kolombatovich said. “The perception by mothers and fathers of their daughter as an athlete, as somebody who is strong, somebody who is self-assured, confident, and athletic changed.”

The change that he observed in the attitudes of parents was striking.

“There were numerous times when I would talk to a parent 25 years ago and be told, ‘I don’t want my daughter to fence too much because it will make her sort of muscular and that’s not feminine,’” he said. “Now, I have mothers and fathers pushing sons out of the way and saying ‘Here’s my daughter: the athlete.’”

Kolombatovich, in his days as a private coach, saw how universities reacted to the changes from Title IX in the early ’70s, too. While many schools saw Title IX as a burden that forced them to cut opportunities for men in order to stay within budget, Columbia was one school that actively expanded opportunities rather than simply redistributing them.

“One of the things that this University has done is truly supported the woman athlete,” Kolombatovich said.

Schools like Tufts, Temple, Northwestern, and Cornell had to eliminate their men’s fencing programs in order to comply with Title IX.

Even his own sport suffered from sexism, but has evolved over the past decades. When Kolombatovich took over in ’79, women were only allowed to fence with one of the three weapons: the foil. As if that wasn’t limiting enough, women were also restricted to four bouts instead of the five that men played.

“Approximately 20 years ago, the International Fencing Federation gave an assignment to the International Federation Medical Commission to see if women could fence sabre,” he said. “Who’s going to faint—a man or a woman? Now there are women running the 100-meter dash faster than Jesse Owens did at the 1936 Olympic games.”

I had always thought that there were two big milestones in terms of women’s empowerment history: getting the right to vote, and entering the workforce. In my generation, women have been encouraged to succeed in everything they try, almost to the extent that it seems that men are being left behind. I really believed that the stereotype of women as the frail, weaker sex was something of fiction to a modern woman. Maybe the naivete of youth kept me from seeing why women these days are pushed so hard to achieve: women of older generations are making sure that girls today get every opportunity that wasn’t traditionally extended in the past.

With cultural changes so radical over the course of my lifetime, I’m exciting to see how far Columbia has come in gender equity. Do you think that by the time we start a new generation, we’ll be able

Lisa Lewis is a Barnard College junior majoring in economics.
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