Paris — Though separated by decades and distance, four-time Canadian Olympian Sherraine Schalm and newly minted bronze medalist Eleanor Harvey are forever bound by fencing and weirdness.

There was the 29-year-old Harvey on Sunday night in the Grand Palais, gobsmacked at having won Canada’s first ever fencing medal, a bronze; and there was Schalm at that same moment, sitting in her car on the side of the highway, somewhere between Rome and her home in Peschiera del Garda, Italy, bawling her eyes out.