CAIRO, Egypt – Fencer Alexander Massialas '16 is believed to be the first Stanford-affiliated athlete to clinch a berth in the 2020 Tokyo Olympic Games.
Massialas made the team Saturday by earning a bronze medal at the FIE World Cup. His results guarantee Massialas will be among the top two athletes in the senior national team point standings, which end in April.
The No. 1-ranked U.S. men's foil team had previously locked up its Olympic spot in November 2019 via its FIE ranking.
Massialas in 2016 became the first U.S. man to win two fencing medals in the same Olympic Games in more than a century. He was part of a four-man foil team that won a 2016 Olympic bronze and the 2019 world title together. It came into this weekend riding a 14-competition medal streak in World Cup team competition.
Tokyo will mark the third Olympic Games for Massialas, 25. Longtime foil teammate Gerek Meinhardt made his fourth Olympic team.
The two have been friends for two decades. Meinhardt was taking piano lessons from Massialas' mother, Vivian, when he discovered fencing at age 9 through the Massialas family and began training with Alexander and being coached by his father, Greg.
Greg Massialas, a three-time Olympian and current coach of the national team, is the patriarch of a talented fencing family. In addition to himself and Alexander, daughter Sabrina Massialas has also found great success in the sport, winning a gold medal at the 2014 Youth Olympic Games and reaching the world championships four times in women's foil. She entered the weekend fifth in the national team standings.
It's Alex, however, who is setting the standard now.
The San Francisco native earned his first Olympic berth in 2012 at age 18, making him the youngest male athlete on the U.S. Olympic team. He's since gone on to medal-winning performances at both the Olympic Games and world championships, as well as a standout career at Stanford, where he won two NCAA individual titles.
In 2013, Massialas anchored the U.S. squad to its first medal at the World Championships, a silver. Since then the team has won two more world silver medals, plus a historic gold medal in 2019 — the first for the U.S. men's foil team.
Massialas also claimed an individual silver medal in 2015.
His greatest accomplishments, however, came at the Olympic Games Rio 2016. In the individual competition, he reached the final and ultimately won a silver medal, becoming the first U.S. man to win an individual foil fencing medal since 1960. Then he joined with Meinhardt, Miles Chamley-Watson and Race Imboden to win the team bronze medal, Team USA's first in men's team foil since 1932. The combined feats made Massialas the first U.S. men's fencer to win two medals at an Olympic Games since 1904.