The Cuban plane exploded over Barbados in 1976, killing all 73 people on board - including Cuba's entire fencing team.

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Thankfully, Olga says she is happy in Kiev - she has made friends, and her boyfriend of two years is also on the fencing team.

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Among them is the gold medal she won at the Beijing Olympics, aged just 17 years old, as part of Ukraine's three-woman sabre fencing team.

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"I have not seen any useful data for fencing with regard to recruiting services, " said Michael Aufrichtig, head coach of Columbia University's fencing team, in an email.

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In the movie he comes across as a narrowly focused computer nerd, yet in real life he was a jock, of sorts, too captain of his high school fencing team.

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At Exeter, he became captain of the fencing team.

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Peter Schifrin, a member of the U.S. fencing team in the 1984 Olympics, is a longtime sculptor who has done numerous commissioned pieces and teaches sculpture at the Academy of Art University in San Francisco.

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Jim Wolfensohn was a second-year student at the University of Sydney when a friend of his and the captain of the fencing team, Rupert Bligh, asked if he wanted to go to Melbourne the next day to fence in the national university championships.

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