DisclosureRadu sent me an advance digital copy of his book prior to publication. Once published, I purchased the book from Amazon.

The most dangerous person in a young fencer’s career is rarely the opponent across the strip. Often it is someone who loves them, sometimes it’s the fencer themself. Andrew Radu’s Losing to a Y-14: 72 essays about fencing, philosophy and psychology is the most honest account I’ve read of how that happens, and it arrives just as the stakes, the money and the crowds in American fencing keep growing.

Radu is qualified to write it from both sides of the strip. He was an NCAA All-American and four-time Ivy League champion foilist at Penn. Today he is a board-certified psychiatrist, Medical Director for Outpatient Behavioral Health at MedStar Washington Hospital Center, and an assistant professor at Georgetown. He opens the preface with a section addressed to parents: “I wrote this for you as much as for your fencer.”

The title carries the argument. The Y-14 stands for anyone a fencer believes they could never lose to: a child, an old guy, an unheralded opponent. Radu’s closing essay insists that loss eventually comes for every strong fencer, and that the real suffering comes less from the loss than from believing it defines you. Parents who tie a child’s worth to results build that belief at home.

I’ve written about this at length: the pressure of fencing and the psychological strain it places on youth fencers is more concerning now than ever. Increasingly, kids are being expected to deliver results not driven by the joy of fencing, but by extrinsic motivators in the form of college recruiting, delivering for coach, and an obligation to perform for the parents who bankroll this expensive sport.

Radu came up when his high school team was banished to the cafeteria and fencers were a punchline. That world is gone. Since then, he writes, “elite fencing clubs have proliferated and the number of excellent fencers has at least quadrupled.” His conclusion is blunt:

There are just too many strong fencers now for many to get the results they worked hard for and deserve.

Andrew Radu

Growth brings money, and money brings a transaction. Private lessons, national travel, club dues and recruiting showcases turn many families into investors, and investors expect a return. Radu names it without euphemism: “Collective ambition and family expectations of a return on investment can be a b****”

He also sees what the market does to parents themselves. In “Nobody,” a group of club parents corners him after he wins a bronze, and he watches them treat his answers as inside information: “Being a fencing parent is itself a competition to acquire the choicest information.” Fencing parents, he adds, “are often used to being told what they want to hear.” His aim, when he meets one, is to show them “everything in the sport that their money cannot buy.”

In Radu’s story, there’s no villain parent. Radu’s mother came home on the train from her engineering job in Manhattan, ate a quick meal, and turned straight around to drive him back into the city to train at Fencers Club. His parents had escaped communist Romania so he could have a better life. He is grateful, and says so.

That is exactly why his next sentence hurts: “The pressure I felt to pay back her sacrifice with good results was tremendous and I am far from the only one to feel it.” The toxicity he describes is rarely a parent screaming in the stands. It is the debt a child decides they owe, and the results they believe will pay it.

In “Westbrook,” the debt comes due. His father loses his job, the fights at home are about money, and Radu stays at the club until closing “to avoid hearing them argue.” He breaks all his blades and borrows a lefty’s foil.

I was clinically depressed but didn’t tell anyone.

Andrew Radu, “Westbrook”

He was a college student on the edge of the senior international travel squad, and no one in his fencing life knew.

The louder kind of fencing parent shows up too: the NYC dad who pronounced him “too idiosyncratic to be good,” and the online dad sure that celebrating a touch is “ruining ze sport.” Radu’s verdict on that type is short: “Some of the least knowledgeable people tend to hold the loudest opinions.” Good lord, is he correct. This sport has more people affected by Dunning-Kruger than any sport on earth.

Radu’s sharpest point for parents is that the damage usually comes from good intentions taken too far. Ambition tips into performance anxiety. Grit teeters into burnout. Toughness tips into permanent injury.

He lived the last one. He tore his hip labrum as a sophomore, told no one so he wouldn’t lose his starting spot, and carried the injury for years. Later he watched a Penn champion fence through a similar injury “in tears.” In “Knocked Out” he takes apart the “got up and scored the next touch” story that families love to post, and lays out what a psychiatrist who treats brain injury wants after a hit to the head: stop, rest, get checked.

Radu doesn’t exempt himself from the culture he criticizes. He describes menacing younger opponents, yelling at referees, using “dark arts” closeouts that once clipped an opponent’s jaw at NCAAs, and seething with jealousy when a teammate surpassed him. The psychiatrist looking back sees the cost. The competitor believed it was the price of winning, and Radu admits he still can’t settle the question:

I wonder if the bad feelings supported my success or just came along for the ride.

Andrew Radu

The adults around the athlete include coaches, and Radu is unsparing there too. He has watched coaches comment on their female fencers’ bodies, and he sees the results in his practice: “Many can place the onset of a mental disorder to those words and other trauma experienced through their sport.” His standard for whom parents should trust with their child fits in one line:

A good coach needs first to be a good person.

Andrew Radu

He doesn’t hand parents a checklist. The book calls itself “anti-systematic,” and he refuses to tell the club parents in “Nobody” what will work for their kids. But the asks are clear once you collect them:

1. Separate love from results.

   You are not your parents’ prized pony and shouldn’t have to earn their love and admiration through fencing greatness.

2. Celebrate more than the medals.

   Make sure to celebrate more than just the good results. His essay “Mid” shows how elite culture shrinks even a cadet worlds medal to a shrug, and a child picks that up at home first. My parents celebrated effort and hard work, but you better believe they would give me an earful if I didn’t give it my all. Results were secondary.

3. Don’t assume your own success transfers.

   Fencing is not as similar to whatever other thing you have excelled at as you want it to be.

4. Let the reward be theirs.

   Please stay humble and let your young fencer find their own reward. It will not always be what you imagined.

5. Leave the exit open.

   In “Free,” he tells young fencers they can set down the weapon tonight or forever, and pick it back up whenever they want. A parent who can say that out loud has taken away half the pressure.

Radu does something safeguarding modules and sideline talks rarely manage: he makes the cost of youth competition feel personal. Radu is the kid who felt the debt, the psychiatrist who treats its aftermath, and now a father. After his 2024 bronze in Columbus, his five-year-old asks on a video call whether he had to beat a lot of daddies for the medal.

I beat 8 nice daddies and lost to 2 nice daddies.

Andrew Radu, Columbus 2024

The parenting message also travels inside stories people will want to read anyway: a coach drilling extensions in the family living room, seven straight touches from Rolando Tucker, a self-cross-examination over whether his 2021 Summer Nationals win counts as a national title. A family will finish this book.

I’ve known Andy more than half my life going back to when he was a camp counselor at UPenn. I’ve admired his fencing journey and looked up to him, but to see him open up with a level of candor and vulnerability here is refreshing, and everyone from athlete to coach to parent will find something in Radu’s essays—that is, if they possess the self-awareness to let his words resonate.

As American fencing gets bigger, more expensive and more competitive, the pressure on young fencers will grow with it. Radu is clear that some of that pain comes with the pursuit of excellence itself, even in healthy clubs and loving homes. Parents and coaches can’t remove it, but they decide whether a young fencer carries it alone. Losing to a Y-14 won’t make anyone a better fencer, and it doesn’t try to. It may make someone a better fencing parent. Radu wrote it, he says, because “I wish I had a release valve back then, so I wrote this to give your fencer one.”