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Posted by Sherraine Schalm | Aug 14, 08 03:36 AM

I’m not too sure what to say but most of you reading this blog have certainly heard of the unfortunate combination of my short temper, our lack of Canadian medals and what must have been a slow media day.

As was emphasized in my interviews, I deeply apologize for my words. They were over-emotional and inappropriate. When you’re hammering a nail and accidentally hit your finger you are likely to react emotionally to the pain you feel… and sometimes perhaps you say a word that you wouldn’t say while sitting in a church pew.

Such was the case in my match. I had worked for many years for success on the piste when a complicated history with my opponent led to my loss, I didn’t have the presence of mind to restrain my emotional reaction. For that, I am sorry.

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Posted by Sherraine Schalm | Aug 7, 08 05:14 PM

“Oh I’d love to have a sword like this at home to use on my kids/husband/wife when they get out of line! Ha! Ha!”

Strangely enough this is the most frequent comment I receive after giving a fencing demonstration to adults. Kids want to know if fencing hurts or if I win money or how many hours I train every day. (No, only twice and six, by the way.) Adults the world over seem to have a secondary instinct longing to control everyone and punish those who don’t fall into line. Their line.

This is why I find it so hilarious that everyone is getting all bent out of shape when it comes to China’s control of its people.

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Posted by Sherraine Schalm | Aug 6, 08 04:26 PM

We were floating around a Hungarian bathhouse last month when I mentioned that I would be on the Olympic team with Jujie Luan, the world’s most famous female athlete. “Uh, sorry but who is Jujie Luan?” my boyfriend Matteo asked.

Jujie is China’s first gold-medallist in the sport of fencing (1984) and considering the population of the country she represents she doubtless is the most well-known female athlete on the planet. Before the 2000 Olympics I was at an outdoor market in Melbourne, and, as is the case with me, I was asking for a lower price on account of my being, ahem, an Olympic fencer.

“Oh!” exclaimed the salesman, fanning his face with his fingers, too excited to breathe. “Luan Jujie!” he yelped and clamped a tiny koala bear onto my hat brim where it clung as I sighed and moved onto the next vendor. OK, so this man happened to be an immigrant from China but still….

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Posted by Sherraine Schalm | Jul 11, 08 02:49 PM

Sure the hygiene was sub-par and the animal sacrifices were a little much but after last Wednesday I can say that those Romans circa 300 AD understood justice more than the IOC ever will. In my rage at having missed a whole day of training to prove my innocence in order to compete at the Olympic Games I did a little reading and discovered something.

As an athlete, I am outside the law…in all the wrong ways.

Oh, don’t worry, the rest of you are innocent until proven guilty. The Romans made sure of that. Emperor Julian knew how dangerous it could be to have the assumption of accusation always hanging over your head and asked, “If it suffices to accuse, what will become of the innocent?”

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Posted by Sherraine Schalm | Jun 25, 08 11:23 AM

In these months of Olympic hype I have taken on a new attitude that is paying dividends. I’ve been listening a little less to the media around me and a little more to John F. Kennedy. And so I have been spending my time asking not what my country can do for me but asking what I can do for my country.

Perhaps for some nations this can be problematic. What can the French do for their country? Develop 300 more types of cheese? And the Americans, what can they do? Continue to apologize for George W. Bush? For Canadians this question is clearly answered in our national anthem: we stand on guard for thee. Of course in my sport it is “en garde!” which, roughly translated, means “Fencers, get rrrready to rrrrumble!”

So I did.

And for the first time in over two years, I won a World Cup.

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Posted by Sherraine Schalm | May 22, 08 09:55 PM

With less than a year to go to the Olympic Games I changed coaches. It seemed like a strange tactic when only months earlier I was ranked number one in the world, but with age comes experience. And as any divorced woman will tell you, what you look for the second time around is much different.

Divorced? What the heck does that have to do with picking a fencing coach? Well, in case you haven’t competed on the international stage in an individual sport let me explain: a coach-athlete relationship is eerily like a marriage.

The basis for any good marriage (and good coach-athlete relationship) is honesty. My fencing coach Gabor has it in spades. Due to my pansy reaction he saw at the last World Cup I have forced him to make training much more intense. He will have to be extremely hard on me emotionally and physically. Basically he has to become a real jerk.

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