During the 2020 Olympic Games in Tokyo (held in 2021 due to COVID), Maia Mei Weintraub served as a training partner for the U.S.A. fencing team.
Her goal, as she told multiple media outlets then, was to make the team for the 2024 games in Paris.
This week, she reached that goal.
The Jewish Philadelphian will participate in the women’s team foil event on Aug. 1 at the Grand Palais. The team foil event is taking place between July 27 and Aug. 4. Three foil athletes from each team take turns competing to reach 45 points. Fencers earn points by hitting the target areas between the shoulders and groin.
Weintraub is one of four athletes on the U.S. team. She qualified with strong performances in recent international competitions. The Princeton University student and fencer won gold at the USA Fencing Division I Women’s Foil National Championship in 2023 and the World Cup event in Hong Kong in May.
“Getting experience fencing through competition is very important,” Weintraub said in an interview for her profile page on usafencing.org.
At Princeton, Weintraub won the 2022 NCAA National Women’s Foil Championship. That same year, she also took gold in Junior Team Women’s Foil at the 2022 World Cadets and Juniors Fencing Championships in Dubai.
Her coach, Mark Masters of the Fencing Academy of Philadelphia, told the Exponent that year that she was a “money player.”
“The other person who may be doing fine before — suddenly there’s more at stake. They get anxious, they get nervous, and they make more mistakes,” Masters said. “A money player is somebody who, when the stakes are higher, will perform better. That’s an important characteristic, really, of every top-level athlete.”
The Philadelphian did not become a money player overnight. She began fencing at 9 on the recommendation of her uncles, who had fenced themselves and told her dad she should “try the sport,” Weintraub said on usafencing.org.
Weintraub’s uncles had trained under the same mentor as Masters, so they recommended fencing to her father, who then took her to the Philadelphia coach. She took a beginner’s class and hasn’t stopped since.
“I love fencing,” she said on the Team USA site.
But as the student grew older and better, the teacher told her she needed to leave his classroom. New York and California had more competitive fencing ecosystems than Philadelphia, he said, according to a 2022 Exponent story.
Weintraub’s parents agreed to have her travel by bus to the Manhattan Fencing Club, “a haven for up-and-coming fencers.” She often went three times a week even though she was in high school. The fencer had to complete her homework on the bus.
“We recognized pretty quickly that she has a real love for the sport. We wanted to fuel her passion in something because that’s important to us,” her father, Jason Weintraub, told the Exponent in 2022.
She has maintained the same balance at Princeton.
“It’s not easy being a student-athlete at an Ivy League school,” Jason Weintraub said in 2022. “As you can imagine, the majority of her professors don’t care that she’s traveling around the world representing the U.S. and Princeton. They’re more interested in her own academic obligations.”
Yet Weintraub keeps going and getting better. At her China World Cup victory, she defeated reigning Olympic gold medalist Lee Kiefer and two-time world champion Arianna Errigo. She entered the Olympics ranked fourth in the U.S. in foil and 13th in the world.
“With fencing, to be able to practice the sport, you need to be with other people, and you need to fence against other people — that’s how you get better,” she said in a 2020 interview with the Exponent.
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