Fencing is usually one of the least visible Olympic events, but a year after the Paris Games, it is fueling political, sporting and family drama related to the Russian invasion of Ukraine.
Three Russian fencers who renounced the 2022 invasion in written statements and now live in the United States eligible to compete as neutral athletesrepresenting no country, in the U.S. Summer National Championships that wrap up Sunday in Phoenix.
And that’s just the beginning of the drama. A Russian top coach has been fired after a star team left for the United States three weeks ago. And a high-profile screen divorce has hit the upper echelons of the Russian Olympic Committee, even leading “raspberry frappé” to enter the lexicon as a sword-fighting humiliation.
One of the Russian fencers now training and coaching in San Diego, Konstantin Lokhanov, 24, is a former son-in-law of the president of the Russian Olympic Committee and the ex-husband of a two-time Russian Olympic gold medalist in fencing. He won the men’s saber competition at the US Summer Championships after competing for Russia at the 2021 Tokyo Games.
After winning in Phoenix, the six-foot-tall Lokhanov posed with a Ukrainian fencer as the two held a Ukrainian flag in a defiant show of support. Shortly after arriving in the United States in May 2022, Lochanov had the word “liberty” tattooed on his right forearm.
The invasion marked a shocking turn in the personal and professional life of Lochanov, who had married into the first family of Russian fencing and seemed embedded in a life of athletic royalty.
In 2020, Lokhanov married Sofia Pozdnyakova, 26, who went on to win gold medals at the Tokyo Olympics in the individual and team women’s saber events. She is the daughter of Stanislav Pozdnyakov, 49, the president of the Russian Olympic Committee and a four-time Olympic gold medalist in fencing herself.
But the marriage quickly dissolved and the split became public last September. Lochanov said the divorce had happened for several reasons, the last of which was the war. “I just said I’m not going back to Russia,” Lochanov said in a Zoom interview from Phoenix, calling it his first in English. In subsequent written remarks, he added: “I decided that I could no longer live in a country that kills innocent Ukrainians.”
Both Lochanov and Pozdynakova have said they declined his invitation to leave Russia with him. She has said that she filed for divorce and was grateful to Lochanov for many things, but the couple had moved in “different directions.”
Pozdnyakov, the Russian Olympic chef — in conversation with Match TV, a sports channel owned by Gazprom, the Kremlin-controlled energy company, confirmed the dissolution of his daughter’s marriage. With a clear swipe at Western frivolity, he said Match TV last September that his daughter’s upbringing and “love for the motherland” had enabled her to avoid “the sad fate of frightened lovers of raspberry frappé and yellow scooters”.
Lochanov said he found the comment amusing and unsurprising, even though he wasn’t quite sure why it was made. “I’ve never owned a scooter,” he said with a smile. “I’m a big coffee lover, but not a frappe.”
In an Instagram post last December, Lokhanov said he had entered a “really black period” after his mother died of Covid-19 at the age of 43 in late 2021. operations in Germany for a hip injury that threatened his fencing career.
He flew to Munich for the second operation on February 23, 2022. A day later, Russia invaded Ukraine. During weeks of convalescence in Germany, Lochanov considered whether to return to Russia. Instead, he flew to Atlanta in May 2022 to stay with a friend and then received an invitation to join a fencing club in San Diego.
He said he didn’t consider himself brave, only to have made a natural decision that he doesn’t regret. To stay in Russia, he said: “You have to forget that it is bad to kill other people.”
When the invasion began, “everything split into black and white” for him, Lochanov said, adding: “If I hear that everything is not clear, then what is not clear? It is as clear as possible. Killing other people is bad .”
Another Russian fencer now in the United States, Sergey Bida, 30, won gold in the team épée event at the U.S. Championships, two years after winning a silver medal for Russia in the same event at the 2021 Tokyo Olympics .
“American athletes go to Russia and end up in jail,” said Jack Wiener, a New York lawyer representing Lokhanov and Bida, referring to basketball star Brittney Griner. “Russian fencers come to the US and wake up with gold medals.”
A third Russian, Oleg Knysh, 25, also competed in the US Championships.
Of the fencing powers, Russia and the former Soviet Union trail only Italy, France and Hungary in winning Olympic medals. The departure last month of épée stars like Bida and his wife, Violetta Kraphina Bida, another Tokyo Olympian, was so embarrassing that Russia fired its national épée team coach, according to state news agency Tass. (Kraphina Bida did not compete in the US Championships.)
The highly regarded coach, Alexander Glazunov, was fired “for the flight of his athletes to the United States without permission” by the Russian Fencing Federation, Tass reported on July 1.
International federations for some sports, including fencing, have begun allowing athletes from Russia and Belarus — a close Russian ally that served as a staging post for the invasion of Ukraine — to compete as neutrals without national symbols, according to a trail created by the International Olympic Committee.
That path is expected to extend to the Paris Games. If so, athletes from the two countries could potentially compete if they did not publicly endorse the Russian invasion and are not affiliated with the Russian military or state security agencies.
But Lochanov and Sergey Bida gave up a lot by leaving Russia, including perhaps their immediate Olympic dreams. They are not US citizens, so they are not eligible to compete for the United States in the World Fencing Championships, which begin in Milan on July 22. And without extraordinary government intervention, there’s a slim chance they’ll get US citizenship before the Paris Olympics.
There seems to be no chance that Russia would welcome them back. Lochanov said he did not want to fight for Russia again. The best options for him and Bida, according to Wiener, their lawyer, seem to be finding a third country that will grant them citizenship for the Paris Games, or trying to compete for the Refugee Olympic team.
Or, Lokhanov said, maybe he can postpone his dream and compete in the 2028 Olympics via Interstate 5 from San Diego in Los Angeles.
“I dream of going to the Olympics, in my own car,” he said.