Learning from a bad tournament

In the last eight months, I’ve had the honor of traveling internationally to fence for Team USA. And, after a lot of successs, I wanted to cap off my last year in the under-17 age group with the title of world champion more than anything else.
World Championships this year was held in Wuxi, China. I happened to be one of the three people representing Team USA.
I spent the weeks leading up to April 8 only focused on training and being as prepared as I could for this goliath of a tournament. I stayed late after practice each day, and when there wasn’t practice, I thought about what I would work on next practice. The last thing I wanted was not to do well, and I regret not training hard enough or putting in enough work.
When the day came to actually fight, I couldn’t have been more nervous, but excited at the same time. One of my close friends and mentors once told me to “embrace the discomfort and thrive in it.” I internalized this more than anything else on the day of my event.
That day, I fenced the best I have ever fenced in my life. It felt like I was unstoppable.
After two rounds of prelims, some people are cut, but most make it to the direct elimination table. I was worried about four people in the competition: the other two Americans, an Italian, and a Turk. All four were in the bottom bracket, but I was in the top, meaning that I wouldn’t have to fence any of them until the finals.
Seeing this gave me an incredible boost of confidence, and I knew I had a really good shot at the world championship title.
My round of 32 match was against a Russian I’d never seen or heard of before, which was a really promising sign for me.
That’s when it all came crumbling down.
In fencing, the first person to get 15 points wins. The final score against him was 15-13; I lost.
Defeat swept over my body as I stood there, crushed. The loss took a minute to sink in. It stung when it did.
During the fight, nothing worked in my favor. The whole match felt completely out of my control, and I remember telling my coach after the bout that it felt like I had lost before even stepping on the strip. It seemed like I sucked at the one thing I was supposed to be good at.
Just like that, months of dieting, working out and intense training felt like they had gone down the drain. I had let my coaches, who had put in so much work preparing me for this tournament, down. On top of that, when I returned to school from my week-long hiatus, I had 15 missing assignments and five assessments waiting for me to make up.
There’s a cliché that goes something like, “In your lowest moments, you find out the most about yourself.” I thought there would be no coming back, and my image as a “good” fencer was ruined forever.
But like the cliché says, I was strangely motivated to bounce back in those moments of defeat and disappointment. After returning to Dallas, I resumed training with a new mindset. Not to avoid failure, but to grow from it. It took losing at the biggest competition of my life for me to realize that.
Looking back, I had a phenomenal season. Sure, it sucks I couldn’t end it the way I liked, but this one loss doesn’t overshadow all my other successes. I realize now that life is like an odyssey full of trials like this. It’s easy to define yourself by one bad moment, but that never tells the whole story. One bad tournament doesn’t make a bad season. One bad season doesn’t make a bad career.