While many Pali students and staff spent their summer watching the 2024 Paris Olympics from home, alumni Miles Partain and Nick Itkin were in Paris competing on the world stage.
Miles Partain made his Olympic debut on the United States beach volleyball team, advancing to the quarterfinals. He played his Olympic matches in the specially created Eiffel Tower Stadium in the Champ de Mars gardens and below the Eiffel Tower itself.
Partain’s path to success began at Pali, where he played indoor volleyball as a setter and opposite hitter for three years. The team won three CIF City Section Championships. Following graduation, Partain was a setter at UCLA.
Current volleyball coach Carlos Gray coached Partain for three years, on both the Pali team and the Pacific Palisades Volleyball Club. Gray considered Partain to be a major part of one of his best Boy’s Volleyball Teams for both his skills on the court and his attitude while playing.
“[Coaching Partain] was a wonderful experience because of the person he was,” Gray said. “He was an amazing player from the time I met him, and he always worked hard. I could tell early on that he was going to be a great player.”
Since graduating, Partain has continued to visit Pali to talk to the volleyball teams. Last spring, he spoke to the Boy’s Varsity Volleyball Team during their season about work ethic.
Gray is proud to have coached Partain for both the legacy he continues to give Pali and the person and player he was.
He concluded, “it was an absolute honor to have him in our program, and it’s an honor to tell people he was part of our program.”
Fellow Olympian and Pali Alumni Nick Itkin is a foil fencer with two Olympic bronze medals – one in men’s team foil fencing from the 2020 Tokyo Olympics and one in men’s singles foil fencing at the 2024 Paris Olympics.
Itkin’s fencing bouts were in the Grand Palais Museum, an Olympic venue for fencing. He described the atmosphere and setting of the bouts as very different from other fencing competitions.
“In a regular competition we don’t have a full venue with crazy, screaming fans,” he said. “[But at the Olympics] you can barely hear yourself think. You can’t hear your coach talk.”
Itkin also noted that fencing at the Olympics has much more to do with mindset than physical skills.
“It’s just a mental game at [the Olympics], it wasn’t even that much of a physical tournament,” he said. “Normally it’s completely different mentally.”
Itkin began fencing at seven-years-old under coaching from his father, and continues to be coached by him today. However, Itkin truly fell in love with the sport after he took a break from it.
“[I realized] how much I liked [fencing] and how much I missed it,” he said. “I just love overplaying your opponent and trying to figure him out.”
During his time at Pali, Itkin competed in numerous fencing tournaments. He credits communication with his teachers as being the key for managing a busy fencing schedule and schoolwork.
Itkin won back-to-back World Championship medals in 2022 and 2023 in addition to multiple Pan American Championships, Pan American Games and US National Championships. He also won two consecutive National College Athletics Association Fencing Championships while at the University of Notre Dame.
Today, Itkin says one of his biggest ambitions is encouraging more people to get involved in the sport.
“It’s just great to see how many people are watching fencing now and giving the sport some respect,” he said. “It’s a fun sport to do, and the goal is to get people into it.”
Although he has no solid plans to date, Itkin intends to show Pali fencing and hopefully inspire students to “pick up a mask and start stabbing people” — in the safety of a fencing club.
