The day of the women’s foil individual gold medal bout, Lauren Scruggs spent an hour lying down in her room, thinking about what she was about to do and the road to get there.
Going into the 2024 Paris Olympic Games, the 21-year-old from Queens wasn’t projected to medal, let alone compete for gold. But bout after bout, Scruggs battled her way past formidable opponents, including number-one-ranked Arianna Errigo of Italy in the eighth round. On Sunday, July 28, Scruggs’s breakthrough run earned her a place in the final against American teammate and reigning Olympic champion Lee Kiefer.
In the quiet moments of last-minute preparation, the first-time Olympian didn’t get bogged down by the pressure and high stakes. Instead, as she tells SELF in a video call from Paris, she felt joy.
“Obviously I’d known we’d made history being the first two Americans on a podium like that, so I wanted to go out there and have fun and enjoy the full environment of being in the Grand Palais and fencing in front of America and the world,” Scruggs says.
Later that day inside the iconic 124-year-old fencing venue, Scruggs earned a silver medal to Kiefer, who won 15-6. That made Scruggs the first Black American woman to earn an individual Olympic fencing medal. Four days later, the rising senior at Harvard kept the momentum going by helping the US clinch the gold medal in the women’s fencing team foil competition—the team’s first-ever gold in the event. According to OutSports, Scruggs’s hardware added to the current LGBTQ+ medal count of 24 so far in Paris.
A few days after the tournament, Scruggs says she was still in a bit of shock. In the span of a week, she rode the Team USA boat into her first Opening Ceremonies, experienced surreal moments in Paris (including an introduction with Snoop Dog), and made history in the sport while representing her country. Looking back on it all, Scruggs believes a low-pressure approach, gratitude, and satisfaction—she entered the tournament already happy with her performance in the months leading up to the Games—helped her excel in ways she didn’t imagine.
“I didn’t have any pressure of ‘Oh, I need to do this or that,’ I just wanted to have fun and enjoy the experience,” she says. “The Olympics tend to reward people who are fighters. Every match, I was trying to fight, put all of my energy into every bout, and I think that’s what gave me the edge. I wasn’t worried about technical things. It was the energy I was putting out there.”
For Scruggs, much of her life had been building up to this groundbreaking moment. She got her start in the sport at the age of seven. Inspired by her brother, Nolen, who picked up fencing after watching Star Wars, she quickly emerged as a global standout. In 2019, she became the youngest US foil fencer to win the Junior World Fencing Championships. Last year, she won the NCAA title for the Crimson.