Curtis McDowald

Everything about the sport of fencing – from the equipment that anonymizes its wearers to its precision movements – is designed to discourage individuality. Perhaps thats why Queens, New York native Curtis McDowald made such a splash during his Olympic debut in Tokyo this past summer. Curtis is an unignorable presence whose extreme dedication, style, and resilience are helping to augur in a new era for an antiquated sport. We caught up with Curtis right after what may have been the strangest Olympic Games in memory to chat about mentors, post-Olympic depression and realizing childhood dreams.

SAMANTHA BLOOM

What’s the most important advice you ever received?

CURTIS MCDOWALD

When I was about 14 years old, I was kicked out of my fencing club for taking a bag from the lost and found to bring my weapons to a competition. I was suspended for about a year, and lost my funding and the opportunity to train during the suspension. It was a harsh punishment to place on a young child, and I wasn’t the only person to experience something along those lines. It was a tough position to be in at that age and usually, it results in that kid not fencing ever again, or acquiring a feeling of a stigma that they can’t really seem to shake. My teammate, Ben Bratton, gave me a really simple piece of advice. He said: you can let a moment like this define you, or you can be the first person in our program to have overcome it. It was super simple and specific to the situation, but resonated across different areas of my life. Hearing that gave me this drive to overcome that and other personal challenges, for which I had no playbook. The idea that I could be the first to do something was totally new to me. Now, when I find myself in a really tough situation that may be uncharted territory, I know I’ll be able to figure it out regardless of whether I have a model.

SB Who is your unlikeliest mentor?

CMD To me, an unlikely mentor isn’t a person, it’s pain and suffering. I have dozens of ways I can get into that –

SB – choose your own adventure.

CMD As an athlete, it’s so painful to lose in practice or even worse, in competition not because the person you were competing against was better than you, but because you made a mistake. You don’t learn any lessons when you win and succeed, but you remember failure, pain, and suffering, and resolve to do something different in order to not make that same mistake again. And then you learn how to take those failures in stride without any loss of enthusiasm, knowing that it was in service of the next thing.

SB Is that inner strength something that anyone can cultivate?

CMD There’s only two options: to either succumb to pressure and let it break you, or push through. And I think you have a choice in the outcome You get tired of being a place where your circumstances continue to define you and pull you down. And at some point, you make a decision because you’re too uncomfortable, too tired, or just done. That’s where the change happens.

SB How are you thinking about pain immediately after the Olympics?

CMD Whether they medal or not, I think every athlete experiences postOlympic depression. I heard this quote from (Olympic speedskater) Apollo Ohno that‚ the difference between becoming a celebrity and going back to your local town and maybe becoming a gym teacher is the difference between two handclaps’... that’s the time difference between a medal. But the emphasis of pushing through and pushing through, there’s a danger in that as well – not listening to your body, not listening to your mind, can do more harm than good. You have to find a balance.

I haven’t returned to training (since Tokyo). I’ve been in Europe for over a month now, avoiding anything that I thought was going to cause me more stress, because I truly could not have dealt with any more stress than I have at this point. From the crazy amount of media attention, both positive and negative, to the actual pressures of competing, to the pressures of qualification, to all the politics happening behind the scenes. At this current moment, I’m taking a great deal of time, energy, and money to step away from all the stress, travel without a fencing bag, my weapons, or my uniform for the first time in my life. And I’m seeing places I’ve been before with different eyes.

SB Who do you call for advice?

CMD I call a lot of people for advice. I really love this idea because I personally spend a great deal of time on the phone, which a lot of people my age don’t do. But I’m I’m always seeking out mentors and advice, from people whether they’re in my field or not. There’s just so many amazing people to get advice from. I call a lot of the guys from the Fencer’s Club, like Ben Bratton, Dwight Smith, Adam Rodney, even Peter Westbrook. But then I have a lot of people in my personal life that I’ve met while in New York or traveling, who have given me really good advice. With a little bit of luck and clarity on the people I want to connect with, I’ve been fortunate to have been able to find a way to talk to them. Ryan Leslie is a producer, artist, and entrepreneur who runs a company called Superphone. Sophia Chang formerly worked with artists like the WuTang Clan and D’Angelo. She now has a women’s mentorship group where she brings in people from her network to help people for whom her information and contacts would be valuable. I’ve been fortunate to have relationships with them both, to be able to pull some information from them outside of their companies, and to utilize some of their resources.

SB If you could call anyone in the world for advice, who would you call?

CMD Elon Musk. He can say: ‘my dreams and aspirations are so big that they’re now extraterrestrial’, and then has the time and means to go into outer space. I know a lot of people may see that as a billionaire’s overindulgence. But how many people can say that about their childhood dream –

I’m going to be an astronaut or travel to space, one way or another – it’s a crazy position to be in.

SB To have the headspace to imagine things that take you to literally stratospheric places?

CMD Exactly. This is a guy who has gotten to a point in his career where he can literally point to his most innate childhood dream and be able to say yeah, I’m doing that. I think that’s what everyone truly aspires to do – find a way to get to their personal equivalent of ‘space’.

I think as people are trying to figure out what they want out of their lives, part of the process should be going back to childhood, and finding that thing that kept you up at night – that in adulthood may have been beaten out of you as a possibility. Figure out how to put yourself in a position to go and try that.

SB Well, I would put you in that category –aren’t you doing exactly what you wanted to do when you were a kid?

CMD Being an Olympian was definitely a childhood aspiration, but it was only one of them.

I think we tell ourselves you can only get one thing, but I don’t believe that’s the case. That said, everything takes and comes in its own time. So I checked my super big goal off the list, and now I’m moving on to the next one.

SB That’s good advice. I bet you finish your list in its entirety.

CMD I hope so. I’m going to try really hard, that’s all I can promise.

ANYO.NE/CURTIS