By Charles Vanegas
Last week, Joanna Kolbe was awarded the H.H. Kerr award as the Ryerson Female Athlete of the Year. It was just another feather in the cap for the fencer, who won her third straight OUA gold medal in the individual epee competition.
And while Kolbe is a member of the Canadian National team, she isn’t so sure she’d be interested incompeting in the 2016 Olympicsin Rio De Janeiro.
“It’s so expensive [to train foran Olympics],” Kolbe says. “And they (the Canadian Olympic Committee) don’t give any funding, so it’s very difficult.”
She also says the competition is much more difficult at the international level, as European nations — such as her native Poland — have much better fencing programs.For now, the third-year computer science student wants to focus on her studies, saying that she once missed a month and a half of school to compete in international competition — something she says she wouldn’t do again.
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