Olha Kharlan

Olha Kharlan: The Sabre and the Refusal

On 27 July 2023 in Milan, Olha Kharlan beat the Russian fencer Anna Smirnova 15-7 and then declined to shake her hand, offering to tap blades instead. Smirnova sat down on the piste and stayed there for forty-five minutes. The referees produced a black card and disqualified the Ukrainian from the individual World Championships. Within a day, the president of the International Olympic Committee had personally guaranteed her a place at the Paris Games. Twelve months later she won two more Olympic medals and became the most decorated Olympian in her country's history.

Mykolaiv

Kharlan was born on 4 September 1990 in Mykolaiv, in southern Ukraine. Her father coached sailing and swimming and also worked construction and drove cabs; her mother was a painter and plasterer. Her first ambition was ballroom dancing — samba and cha-cha — but the lessons cost too much.

Fencing was her godfather Anatoly Shlikar's suggestion. She started at ten, chose the sabre within a year, and borrowed her equipment for the first two seasons because the family could not buy any. She won a national junior title at thirteen and joined the senior national team at fourteen, in 2005. She studied at the Admiral Makarov National University of Shipbuilding in Mykolaiv.

Beijing, Aged Seventeen

Her Olympic career began at the top. At Beijing 2008 the Ukrainian team won sabre gold, and Kharlan — seventeen years old — scored close to half her three-woman team's touches, taking the decisive final bout 45-44. She has been on an Olympic podium in some form ever since.

She took individual bronze at London 2012. At Rio 2016 she took individual bronze again, beating Manon Brunet 15-10, and team silver. Tokyo 2020 was her one blank tournament; she lost in the first round to Yang Hengyu.

The Championships

Between the Games she assembled one of the great sabre records. She is a four-time individual world champion: Budapest in 2013, where she beat Kim Ji-yeon 15-14 and then Yekaterina Dyachenko; Kazan in 2014, beating Mariel Zagunis 15-12; Leipzig in 2017; and Budapest again in 2019, beating Sofya Velikaya 15-14 — two of the four decided by a single touch. She has twice been a world team champion.

In Europe she has won six individual titles and two team golds, including four consecutive individual championships. She was ranked world number one in women's sabre across five separate seasons: 2012-13, 2013-14, 2017-18, 2019-20 and 2020-21. As a junior she won four consecutive World Championships from 2007 to 2010, the only fencer to take back-to-back golds in both individual and team events. She won individual gold at the 2011 Universiade in Shenzhen, and was inducted into the International Fencing Federation's Hall of Fame in 2016.

Milan

The handshake requirement had been suspended since March 2020, and tapping blades was an accepted substitute. Kharlan offered exactly that, saying she respected her opponent while her country was being invaded. Smirnova refused it and protested. Kharlan was disqualified, lost the Olympic qualifying points attached to the event, was initially barred from the team competition — a decision the FIE later reversed — and could not compete for a fifth individual world title.

Her verdict on the governing body was four words: "This federation will never change."

The IOC's intervention on 28 July, guaranteeing her Paris qualification, was extraordinary and effectively overruled the sport's own machinery.

Paris

She justified it. On 29 July 2024 she won individual bronze against Choi Se-bin, and dedicated the medal to the Ukrainian soldiers and athletes killed by Russia. Days later, at the Grand Palais, she anchored Ukraine to team sabre gold against South Korea, 45-42, scoring five consecutive points in the final bout to close it out; her teammates were Alina Komashchuk, Olena Kravatska and Yuliya Bakastova. It made her a six-time Olympic medallist across five Games, the first Ukrainian woman to medal at four different Olympics, and Ukraine's most decorated Olympian.

She auctioned the sabre from those Games for 10 million hryvnia — roughly $242,000 — for the war effort. It was bought by the football club Metalist 1925 Kharkiv.

Why Olha Is Called a Genius

Sabre is the fastest weapon in fencing, and the honest description of Kharlan's gift is that it is perceptual and physical rather than intellectual. A sabre exchange is decided in fractions of a second: both fencers accelerate from the on-guard line, and the winner is usually whoever correctly reads the other's intention a fraction earlier. There is no time to think in any ordinary sense. What Kharlan has is the ability to extract information from an opponent's first two steps — the weight distribution, the blade angle, the tiny hesitation — and commit before conscious deliberation could finish.

The evidence that this is a genuine and rare capacity is in the margins. Two of her four world titles were won 15-14, and her Olympic gold at seventeen was clinched 45-44. Anyone can win comfortably; producing the correct read on the final touch of a world final, repeatedly, over eighteen years, is not variance. Five seasons at world number one across three different Olympic cycles, in a sport where reflexes are supposed to peak in the early twenties, is the other kind of evidence — it implies she kept replacing lost speed with better prediction.

The counter-case must be stated. This is athletic craft, not intellect, and Kharlan has never claimed otherwise. Her political record is more complicated than the Milan story suggests: she was elected to Mykolaiv City Council for the Party of Regions in 2010 and stood for its parliamentary list in 2012, leaving the faction only in March 2014 during the annexation of Crimea. And the Milan moment made her a symbol partly through circumstance — the courage was real, but it was a refusal, not a strategy. What is unambiguous is the blade work, and that it has lasted longer than anyone's should.

Legacy

Kharlan lives in Bologna with her husband, the Italian Olympic sabreur Luigi Samele; she was previously married to the Ukrainian fencer Dmytro Boiko. Ukraine has given her the Order of Princess Olga and the Order of Merit in all three classes, named her a National Legend of Ukraine on 21 August 2024 and awarded her the Order of Liberty two days later. In 2020 Barbie made a doll in her likeness for its Role Models line; in 2023 she auctioned it for a clinic rehabilitating Ukrainian military personnel.

Her standing rests on two things that ordinarily do not go together: the longest sustained excellence in modern women's sabre, and a single silent gesture on a piste in Milan that made the sport's governing bodies choose a side.

Achievements

• Order of Merit (Ukraine), 3rd class
• Order of Merit, 1st class
• Order of Merit (Ukraine), 2nd class
• Order of Princess Olga, 1st class
• Order of Prince Yaroslav the Wise, 5th class
• Order of Princess Olga, 2nd class
• Order of Princess Olga, 3rd class
• Competed at the 2024 Summer Olympics
• Competed at the 2020 Summer Olympics
• Competed at the 2016 Summer Olympics