Witold Woyda, Fencer Who Won Gold For Poland, 68
DGH
Witold Woyda, Fencer Who Won Gold for Poland, Is Dead at 68
By DOUGLAS MARTIN
Witold Woyda, an Olympic champion fencer for his native Poland who
compensated for a lack of height and reach with dazzling dexterity, died May
5 [2008] at his home in Bronxville, New York. He was 68.
The cause was lung cancer, his wife, Margot, said.
Woyda competed in four successive Olympics, beginning in 1960 in Rome
[Italy]. He won a silver medal in men's foil in 1964 in Tokyo [Japan]. The
foil is the lightest of the three swords used in competitions.
In Mexico City [Mexico] in 1968, he won a bronze medal in team foil. In
Munich [{West) Germany] in 1972, at age 33, old for a fencing champion, he
won gold medals for individual and team foil. He was the first athlete to
win two gold medals for Poland in the same Olympics.
Woyda was 5 feet 7 inches and weighed about 140 pounds when he competed in a
sport in which champions are usually taller and heavier. He used quickness,
superb coordination and aggressive tactics to defeat taller foes who had a
natural advantage in keeping him at a distance. Newspaper reports often used
the word "bouncy" to describe him.
"Big men hate to face him," Jack Keane, tournament director at the
prestigious annual tournament sponsored by Martini & Rossi at the New York
Athletic Club, said in an interview with The New York Times in 1966. Woyda
won the tournament at least five times.
Witold Woyda was born in Poznan, Poland, on May 10, 1939, and was chosen for
the fencing team at 9 or 10 by a teacher who perceived that his lightning
reflexes might make up for his small stature, Margot said. He became part of
Poland's regimented Olympic training program at a time when athletic
competitions between Communist and non-Communist countries were part of the
cold war.
He earned a law degree from the University of Warsaw. He later did some
graduate work in international law at the New York University Law School,
where Miguel de Capriles, the president of the International Fencing
Foundation, was the associate dean. Woyda became a civil court judge in
Poland.
He met his first wife, Nusza, an American and a painter, in Poland. She did
not want to live in Poland, so they moved to Italy, where he coached the
Italian Olympic fencing team and worked as a sports journalist. In 1978,
they moved to New York, [New York] where she had grown up. In New York,
Woyda became the president of the North American division of an Italian
packaging company. The marriage ended in divorce.
In addition to his current wife, the former Margot Zborowska, he is survived
by his daughters Jacqueline Worobel of Guilford, Connecticut, and Dominka
Woyda of Boulder, Colorado; his stepdaughter, Olivia Walzak of the Riverdale
section of the Bronx [New York]; and two grandchildren.
In an interview with The Times in 1980, Woyda said he was thankful that the
Soviet Union and its allies had systematically developed and paid athletes
in order to score propaganda points against Western nations in international
competitions. He said that if he had been born in the United States, with
its amateur ethos, he would not have become a champion Olympic fencer.
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/05/12/sports/othersports/12woyda.html?ref=obituaries