Eli Sukunda is entering his 26th season as the head coach of Carleton University’s fencing program, but even after 51 years in the sport, he has yet to show any signs of slowing down.
As an athlete, Sukunda competed in fencing at the Olympic Games on three separate occasions, notably competing on home soil at the 1976 Montreal Games and serving as fencing team captain at the 1988 Olympic Games in Seoul.
“Team leader. It’s not exactly captain,” said Sukunda, with a laugh. “You’re in charge of the plane tickets and stuff like that, so it sounds more glamorous than it is.”
Sukunda has represented Canada on the world stage as the coach of its national fencing team three times. At the university level, his women’s and men’s teams at Carleton have combined for seven Ontario University Athletics (OUA) conference championships under his leadership.
Sukunda began his fencing career in 1968 at Wayne State University in Detroit. There, he met fencing in-structor Istvan Danosi, who Sukunda described as a “great coach.”
“He was a very charismatic guy,” said Sukunda. “I used to run track, but after I started fencing, it was no comparison for me anymore.”
Members of the present-day Carleton fencing com-munity shared similar sentiments about Sukunda, now on the other side of the coach-athlete relationship.“
There’s some strategy that I think no one else in the country could probably get, other than him,” said Daniel Manyoki, a second-year Ravens fencer and history student.
“He’s sometimes nuts, but that’s a good thing, right? He thinks outside the box, and, you know, at that stage, it’s a good thing, because you don’t want anybody else to know what you’re doing,” Manyoki added.
This past April, Sukunda celebrated his 70th birthday, and he said he sees himself spending“a few more years” active in the fencing community.
In March, Sukunda marked the 41stanniversary of one of his darkest days. On March 8, 1978, while work-ing at his father’s tavern in his hometown of Windsor, Ont., Sukunda was stabbed six times, including three times in the chest, with a six-inch knife.
The blade created an enormous chest wound and came within four millimetres of hitting his heart. Suku-nda was also left with a punctured lung.
“I don’t talk about it much,” said Sukunda. “I did work very hard to overcome the deleterious effects, psycho-logical and physical.”
Sukunda’s biography at the Windsor Sports Hall of Fame, of which he is an inductee, refers to his recovery from this incident as “miraculous.” He returned to com-petitive fencing two months later and won his first in-ternational title exactly seven months to the day after he was stabbed.“
He’s very passionate about fencing, and he has a very deep love for fencing,” said Kyle Girard, an assis-tant coach of Carleton’s fencing team, who has worked with Sukunda since 1998. “He’s very driven, he definitely wants to win, and all that stuff—especially when he is fencing.”
While still participating in active competition, Su-kunda began his transition into coaching in 1977. He coached the University of Windsor Lancers until 1992, leading them to first or second-place conference finishes in 14 of his 16 seasons, before his family decided on a new hometown.“
I had two children, and I wanted them to be brought up bilingually, so my wife and I decided we were going to move to Ottawa,” said Sukunda. He added that his wife, Marie Veilleux-Sukunda, now teaches in the French de-partment at Carleton.
In the 2018-19 season, the University of Toronto Varsity Blues beat the Ravens men’s team by just two points—252 to 250—for the OUA men’s championship. The women’s team finished in fourth place with 126 points, compared to 361 for the first-place Varsity Blues.
Sukunda said that his team has lost many of its main contributors from last year. However, as his teams enter the 2019-20 fencing season, he said he hopes they defy the odds and improve upon their previous results.
“It goes in cycles here, because we don’t recruit, it’s not a big program,” said Sukunda. “The coaching is very good here, the assistant coaches, and the club is very strong, but not large.”
Sukunda and the Ravens will compete again at the OUA championships in February 2020.
Feature image from file.
