After Lauren Scruggs clinched the gold medal for the United States in the women’s fencing team foil competition on Thursday, she threw off her mask and spun around, her eyes and mouth wide open.
It was the team’s first-ever gold in the event. But it wasn’t the first big moment for Scruggs at the 2024 Olympic Games in Paris.
On Sunday, Scruggs, in her Olympics debut, became the first Black American woman to win an individual Olympic fencing medal for the U.S.
“Fencing has largely, historically, been a non-Black sport,” Scruggs told NCAA.com in a July interview. “So I hope to inspire young Black girls to get into fencing and to think that they can have a place in the sport. I just hope that more people who look like me, little girls like me, feel they have a place in the sport.”
A Queens native and a rising senior at Harvard, Scruggs was around 7 when she started fencing. She was inspired by her older brother, Nolen, who was eager to try fencing after seeing “Star Wars,” “Good Morning America” reported.
“As the younger sibling, I always wanted to do whatever he did, so I started fencing, and I stuck with it,” Scruggs told BET in an interview last month.
Scruggs clung to the sport’s competitive nature, telling “Good Morning America” that it channeled her creativity. But as a Black fencer, she felt added pressure whenever she stepped onto the piste.
“Growing up in fencing, no one really looked like me,” she said in the “Good Morning America” interview. “I think in order to prove myself, I really had to be the best at the tournaments.”
She kept winning those tournaments. Scruggs was accepted into the Peter Westbrook Foundation, an organization founded by Peter Westbrook, the first Black American man to win an Olympic fencing medal.
The organization supports young fencers from underrepresented racial and economic backgrounds. Scruggs, who now volunteers as a mentor for the group, eventually wants to own her own fencing club, she said in the BET interview.
Scruggs is a six-time world champion and the youngest U.S. foil fencer to win the Junior World Championship, according to her Harvard bio. She has been named a first-team All American three times at Harvard and was the 2023 N.C.A.A. national champion.
She was No. 11 in the International Fencing Federation’s world rankings when she arrived in Paris.
“I think my success in fencing has also helped break stereotypes about what Black people can do and who can be a fencer,” she told “Good Morning America.”
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