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 ((Photo courtesy of Princeton's Office of Athletic Communications) caption:
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Tiger Fencer Thompson Has Gone the Extra Mile In Journey to Athens Summer Olympic Games
Bill Alden
When it comes to improving his fencing skills, Soren Thompson certainly isn't afraid to go the extra mile to get better.
As a teenager growing up in San Diego, Thompson travelled up the coast to Los Angeles twice a week to seek out the best coaching and competition.
After rising through the ranks and making the U.S. national team in the epee, Thompson headed east to train in New York City, known as a hotbed of the sport due to its concentration of elite fencing clubs.
In 2000, Thompson, whose urge to excel extends to academics, got accepted at Princeton and decided to come to New Jersey to continue his educational and athletic development.
Thompson made an impact for the Tigers, helping the squad to a sixth place finish in the NCAA Championships in 2003. On the international stage, Thompson made a key breakthrough later that year as he finished eighth in the epee at the World Championships, the highest finish for an American man in the event in many years.
Focusing on his goal of making the U.S. national team and qualifying for the 2004 Olympics, Thompson deferred his senior season at Princeton for a year and spent much of early 2004 competing at tournaments across Europe in order to achieve the individual and team rankings necessary to make it to the Athens Summer Games.
Having achieved that goal this spring, Thompson is making the sweetest journey of his fencing career this week as he heads to Athens to compete in the epee event at the Olympics.
While Thompson is realistic about his prospects heading into the games, he is determined to reach new heights. "I'm ranked 26th in the world so I'm not a favorite," said Thompson. "The epee is such an unpredictable weapon, anything can happen. If I have another day like I did when I finished eighth in the worlds anything can happen. It's important to be in the correct mental state."
Achieving that kind of focus has come naturally to Thompson in epee, a discipline that features a weapon that has a stiff blade and a triangular cross section with touches being scored by the weapon's point anywhere on the body.
"I've always loved the individual aspect of the sport," said Thompson, who took up fencing as a seven-year-old through a recreation class in the sport at the University of California at San Diego. "I loved learning the technique. It's a lot different than the other sports I have played. I really loved it, I did it for years before I started competing."
Once Thompson began competing, it quickly became apparent that he had a special knack for the sport. He finished 6th at the junior Olympics in the under-13 classification. Thompson made the U.S. national team for the 1998 World Championships just before he turned 17.
In Thompson's view, a key factor in his meteoric rise through the fencing ranks was his weekly forays to L.A. "In San Diego, the sport was small, there weren't too many people to go against," recalled Thompson, who competed in both foil and epee before deciding to specialize in the latter weapon when he made the 1998 U.S. national team.
"I went up to L.A. twice a week through high school. I was lucky, there were a lot of people who were older and I got good bouts. That really helped me."
Another move that helped Thompson was coming to Princeton. "That was a definite change for someone from the West Coast," said Thompson, who is looking forward to coming back to college this fall. "I've enjoyed being on the Princeton team. I knew it wasn't going to be as difficult as international competition but I knew it could be really good training if I went into it with the right mindset."
Thompson and his teammates have done everything possible to develop the right mindset as they went through a training camp in San Francisco during the last week of July and the first week of August.
"We've been working five hours everyday," explained Thompson, who estimates that he travelled in 20 countries in the first three months of 2004 as he worked to improve his ranking through competing in one international competition after the other. "We're doing a variety of things like sports psychology, strategizing, straight team work, and simulated matches."
Thompson, for his part, believes that he and the U.S. fencing contingent will be ready when it counts most.
"For the whole team, having the experience over the last two years has made us a lot more professional," asserted Thompson. "It'll be more pressure than we've ever faced but I think we're ready for the pressure."
With the many miles that Thompson has travelled in his fencing career, it appears that he is poised to shine at the ultimate stop of his journey.
