It’s hard to imagine what she possibly could have done to draw more attention than standing on a Westdale sidewalk in a white bunny suit on a Saturday afternoon handing out chocolates. Sure it was last Easter weekend and she was being paid to carry a sign directing people to a local candy store, but still.
“People came up and asked to take pictures,” Eleanor Harvey laughs. “People were laughing at me and asking me questions.”
Well it took a year, but the 19-year-old finally figured out how to trump her one-woman public costume party in the being-noticed department. Last week, the Westdale Secondary School grad took silver at the world 20-and-under fencing championship in Bulgaria, establishing her as one of the truly elite in the sport and possibly — hopefully — putting her on track to earn a spot in the 2016 Rio Olympics.
This probably shouldn’t have come as a complete surprise. She’s won a couple of gold medals in cadet World Cups over the years. Last year she won a junior World Cup event, a title at the North American Cup and Junior Pan Am gold. She’s certainly got an impressive resumé.
But this season has been a struggle. In her freshman year at Ohio State University on a fencing scholarship — yes, there are such things — she’d struggled. In 25 events, she was happy with just three results. And the start of this world championship hadn’t gone particularly well.
Actually, it had gone horribly. Her first two round-robin bouts had been disasters. By her own admission, she wasn’t supposed to lose either and she’d dropped both badly. Her stance was off. She felt flat-footed and unathletic. Her point control was absent. She wasn’t reading distances correctly. In her mind, her opponents hadn’t beaten her, she’d beaten herself.
So she went to her secret weapon to regroup.
“You don’t even know how much I have to swear at myself to pump myself up,” she laughs.
Seems a few choice words — OK, more than a few — did the trick. She won her next three matches to qualify for the elimination round where she started rolling. First she beat a Czech woman in overtime, then toppled the world’s sixth-ranked fencer from France in overtime, followed by a win over an Olympian from Lebanon.
In the quarter-finals, she took out the world’s No. 1 from Italy. That was huge. Then she advanced to the finals by outpointing a top competitor from Japan.
The entire run was a massive confidence booster. Harvey desperately wants to compete for Canada in Rio. It’s been her goal for years. Nothing’s changed now that she’s on the senior national team. But getting there is a brutal road that’s almost impossible to navigate.
Fact is, pretty much everything about this sport is a grind.
After having a relatively easy time with lesser competition in recent years, she says the price of competing at this world-class level shocked even her. She was sore for five days after it was over. This, even though she’d prepared by practising eight times a week at school for as much as three hours a day.
“It’s so exhausting,” she said. “You’re defending yourself from being hit by a sword. It’s crazy.”
She’d taken at least one small step this year to reduce the level of craziness involved — shearing off her trademark dreadlocks, which had become a safety concern.
That old line mom used to offer about being careful or you could take an eye out? Everything in this sport can take an eye out. Protection is crucial. Yet the volume of hair she was wearing was causing equipment failures.
“It was so big that sometimes I would be fencing and my mask would be propelled off my head.”
That’s gone now. As are the stumbles from earlier in the season. Even though she lost a close bout in the final to the woman who’d finished fifth at the Olympics, she’s feeling good about where she is today. This was the biggest result of her career.
“It really, really, really, really came together,” she says.
No, her sport isn’t the most visible or the most popular around. Many people have never seen a bout live or on TV. Most wouldn’t know what they were watching if they did. But, if she comes through with results like this a few more times, she’ll start getting noticed back home.
Even without a bunny suit.