Quebecers Maximilien Van Haaster, François Cauchon, Fares Arfa, Pamela Brind’Amour and Olivier Desrosiers will represent Canada in fencing at the Paris Summer Olympics, the Canadian Olympic Committee announced Thursday morning.
Van Haaster, of Montreal, will return to Team Canada after contributing to the Canadian men’s foil team’s ninth-place finish at the 2021 Tokyo Games. Van Haaster notably won silver in the same event at the Pan American Games in Santiago in 2023. Van Haaster also competed in the individual event at the Rio de Janeiro Games in 2016.
For their part, Cauchon, from Montreal, and Arfa, from Laval, will compete in their first career Olympics, in men’s sabre. The saber team won gold at the Pan American Games in Santiago in 2023, and this will be the first time that Canada will send a men’s saber team to the Olympic track since the Atlanta Games in 1996. For its part, Desrosiers, a sabreur from Montreal, will act as a reserve on the national team.
“It’s been a long time since the Canadian men’s saber team has been to the Olympic Games, and we are working hard to make sure it is memorable,” Arfa said in a press release.
Among the women, Brind’Amour, who qualified for Paris 2024 by virtue of her rank in the world rankings, will be the only representative of Team Canada in the women’s sabre. The 31-year-old from Sainte-Martine will be making her first Olympic experience this summer, after knee injuries kept her out of competition for much of the Olympic qualification period. of Tokyo in 2021. Brind’Amour has been part of Team Canada at three editions of the Pan American Games, including in Santiago in 2023, where she contributed to the silver medal won by the Canadian women’s saber team.
The fencing competitions will take place from July 27 to August 4 at the Grand Palais in Paris.