Not many people in Sweden know about fencing. Since it isn’t a major sport people don’t often hear about it until somebody wins World Championships or do really well in the Olympics. Even then, fencers don’t get a lot of media coverage.

One girl called Johanna Bergdahl did really well this past Junior Championships in Azerbaijan – she came first. “Finally getting some credit and recognition for all these years of hard work feels really good!” She said after coming back from Azerbaijan.

Johanna has been training fencing since she was 7 with her father as coach. They now have closer to 13 years of work behind them, with the goal of entering the Olympics in 2012 and 2016 for Johanna. Johanna had to move to Stockholm to be able to keep on developing her fencing. Leaving her family in Ekhagen, Jönköping, she now lives by herself, coming home occasionally for dentist appointments. In Stockholm she now trains with the fencing club FFF Stockholm instead of her original club A6 Fäktning.

Reaching the top for a lot of fencers has meant sacrifices. For Johanna it was hard to combine school work and competitions during her high school time. She says “I like hard work and I really want to be able to succeed in both school and fencing, so I’m not going to give up.” In the summer of 2010 she had plans to do law at Stockholm university. She says she will try combining her university studies and her fencing career and see how it goes. Since then she has competed both in Germany and China amongst many other places.