Team USA’s Nick Itkin Wins His First Individual Medal In Men’s Fencing

PARIS — Olympic athletes are good at a lot of things, but losing is not one of them.

After three Americans advanced in the round of 16 for men’s individual foil, 24-year-old Nick Itkin was the only U.S. man left standing. 

After an impressive three-bout winning streak, the second-seeded Itkin fell to Italy’s Filippo Macchi in the semifinal match 11-15 to advance to the bronze medal match.

“I wasn’t losing two bouts in a row, so I had to get back into it really quickly,” the 24-year-old Team USA athlete said.

That he did.

After taking the first point in the bronze medal match against Japan’s Kazuki IImura, the Notre Dame graduate proceeded to slowly climb up the leaderboard until he eventually walked away with a 15-12 win.

With this being his second Olympics, Itkin left the Olympic Games Tokyo 2020 — where he was one of the youngest fencers — with a bronze in men’s team foil and 12th in individual.

“Obviously, I dreamed of a gold medal,” the two-time NCAA champion said about Paris, “but it’s an honor to be able to come out with an individual medal — something I’ve never done before.”

The last time a U.S. man landed on the podium in men’s individual foil was in 2016 when Alexander Massialas — who was seeded 7th at these Games but lost in the round of 16 — took silver.

Itkin also came into these Games with three more years of experience and two world championship medals — a silver in 2023 in individual foil and bronze in 2022 and silver in team — under his lamé.

Misha Itkin, his coach — and father who was a professional fencer growing up in the Ukraine — gave him a pep talk before the medal match. The younger Itkin remembered his words: “It happened and we worked four years for this moment and if you let that last bout carry into the next bout, [you’ll] never forget it,” Itkin said.

And even though the semifinal bout didn’t work out the way they had planned, his dad reminded him that, “mentally, you just have to forget what happened a minute ago.”

Itkin made good use of his time between bouts, his coach said, “He has his own notes of what needs to be done against each opponent so he had the chance to go through it a little bit, calm down and [he] stayed focus[ed] and it ended up good.”

Fencing since the age of seven, surprisingly this was the first time Itkin had competed in the impressive 8,000-seat Grand Palais, a historical site normally visited daily by tourists.

“This is something I’ve never experienced before,” he said about the glass-domed structure under which he competed. “This is what the sport needs. I’ve been dreaming of moments like this for fencing, and fencing is growing so much that I think this is just the beginning.”

But this bronze is not the end for Itkin who is already thinking about the next Olympics, which will be in his hometown.

“LA is my hometown, so I have to put on for the city,” he said about the next summer Games. “The [athlete] village is UCLA. I live two blocks from there so I’m going hard training to get ready for this.”

Until then, Itkin still has the team foil event which gets underway starting August 4.

Lisa Costantini has covered Olympic and Paralympic sports for more than a decade, including for the International Olympic Committee. She is a freelance writer who has contributed to TeamUSA.com since 2011.