Ukrainian athlete Olga Kharlan, 27, has become the top-ranked sabre fencer in the world, following her victory at the World Championship in Wuxi, China, on July 26.
It is the third time the leader of the Ukrainian national women’s fencing team has reached the top ranking, having previously been crowned the world champion in 2013 and 2014.
Her team’s trip to the championship wasn’t smooth though. When Kharlan and her fellow fencers arrived at a training camp in Japan prior to the tournament, it turned out that their luggage had been lost during a transfer in Paris.
As a result, the Ukrainians spent the first week of training using borrowed fencing suits and equipment until the bags could be found.
The mishap, however, doesn’t seem to have fazed her. She outstripped the Russian Sophia Velikaya and the Hungarian Anna Marton in Wuxi.
Sergei Bubka, the President of the National Olympic Committee of Ukraine, congratulated the athlete and wished her luck in her training for the Tokyo Olympics in 2020.
“Great example of a real athlete and a bright personality,” he wrote on Twitter.
Kharlan already holds a gold Olympic medal for the team sabre, which the Ukrainian team won at the 2008 Beijing Olympic Games, and two bronze medals for individual fencing.
She was selected as the Female Athlete of the Year at the Ukrainian Heroes of Sport Awards in 2016.
Kharlan began fencing at the age of 10 while growing up in Mykolayiv, as her godfather was a fencing coach. She is married to another Ukrainian fencer, Dmytro Boiko, and lives in Kyiv.
