Eli Dershwitz celebrates winning the men's saber world cup on Feb. 3, 2018 in Padoue, Italy.
Eli Dershwitz defeated two-time Olympic champion Aron Szilagyi of Hungary on Saturday to win the saber fencing world cup event in Padoue, Italy.
The win was Dershwitz’s second in world cup competition, following a win this past November in Algeria. He won his first world cup medal when he took silver in May 2017 in Spain.
The 22-year-old Dershwitz, a 2016 Olympian, is ranked sixth in the world. In Padoue, the Boston native won five bouts in the single-elimination tournament before meeting Szilagyi, the 2012 and ’16 Olympic champ, in the final. There, Dershwitz won 2-0.
Dershwitz took a year off from his studies at Harvard to compete for a spot at the Olympic Games Rio 2016, where he finished 19th. One year earlier, in 2015, he became the first American to win a world junior title in saber fencing. He also won a team gold medal at that year’s Pan American Games.
Chrös McDougall has covered the Olympic movement for TeamUSA.org since 2009 on behalf of Red Line Editorial, Inc. He is based in Minneapolis-St. Paul.
