Lacey Biniak, Tommi Hurme and Craig Harkins stepped away from fencing under different circumstances. When they returned, none attempted to recreate the athlete they had once been. They found new ways to make the sport part of the lives they had built.
Some athletes leave fencing because their competitive years have ended. Others step away because life demands something different, opportunities appear or disappear, or the emotional cost of continuing becomes too great.
Leaving, however, does not always mean the relationship is over.
Lacey Biniak, Tommi Hurme and Craig Harkins returned to fencing carrying very different histories. Lacey had pursued the sport with Olympic-level ambition until disappointment and damaged trust made walking into a fencing club emotionally painful. Tommi declined an opportunity to continue toward the Olympic Games as he weighed his financial circumstances, personal priorities and career. Craig’s departure carried less heartbreak, but the sport remained something he loved and eventually rediscovered through his son.
Their returns were equally different. Lacey had to separate fencing from the approval she once believed she had to earn. Tommi discovered the athletic path he declined in his twenties was not the only way fencing could remain central to his life. Craig transformed renewed participation into competition, a new partnership with his son and continued contribution through Fencing.net (a popular independent online reference and community website dedicated to fencing, founed by Harkins in 1995).
None of them returned to recover the exact future they once imagined. They returned to discover what fencing could become after ambition, family, work and experience changed them.
Lacey Biniak
2026 Vet-40 Women’s Epee Team
Lacey Biniak is difficult to overlook. A tattoo artist by profession, she carries much of her artwork on her own body. Yet behind that bold exterior is a fencer whose weapon rewards restraint. Epee is patient, precise, and strategic. Like tattooing, it demands a steady hand, attention to detail, and the discipline to wait for exactly the right moment.
Lacey did not begin fencing until she was sixteen, relatively late for an athlete with international ambitions. Once she discovered it, however, she did not approach it casually. She poured herself into the sport.
Fencing became more than something she did. She competed, taught, repaired equipment, and arranged her life around training. Within a few years, she had risen from a YMCA program in Roseburg, Oregon, to the highest level of American women’s epee. She earned places on senior world teams and came close enough to the Olympic Games that the possibility no longer felt like a childhood fantasy. It felt real.
That made what happened next especially devastating.
Women’s team epee was removed from the program for the 2008 Olympic Games. Lacey believed if the team event had remained, she would have had a genuine opportunity to earn a place on the U.S. Olympic team.
The decision was entirely beyond her control, but it changed the direction of her life. She had given fencing her time, body, identity, and nearly all of her young adulthood. Then the opportunity toward which she had been working disappeared.
“Consequently, I had a little mental breakdown,” she said.
Her understated description barely captures the depth of the loss. Lacey was not simply disappointed about missing a competition. She had built her life around the belief that complete commitment might carry her to the Olympic Games. When that path closed, she also discovered the support system she believed would hold her through the disappointment did not feel as secure as she had thought.
The pressure had been accumulating for years. Lacey felt that she constantly had to produce results, reach the podium and prove she remained worthy of her coach’s attention. During one important semifinal, she remembers being told, “If you win this bout, you will be my favorite.”
For an athlete already carrying the weight of expectation, those words did not feel motivating. They made approval seem conditional.
Lacey cannot know what another person intended. What she remembers is how the experience felt to her. When she struggled, she felt the people she had trusted were moving on without her. She described it as a betrayal.
What was taken from her was not only an Olympic opportunity. It was her trust that the relationships surrounding her fencing would survive a loss. After pouring her whole being into the sport, she found herself wondering whether she still mattered when she could no longer deliver the expected result.
Eventually, she walked away.
Lacey did not leave because she had stopped loving fencing. She left because the pressure surrounding it had made that love almost impossible to reach. What had once given her purpose had become inseparable from fear, validation and the possibility of disappointing someone else.
“Outside validation was the name of the game for previous fencing,” she said.
For years, she built another life. She became a tattoo artist, developing a career enabling her creativity, precision and individuality to flourish. Fencing remained part of her history, but it no longer felt like a place to which she could return.
Then a tattoo client brought her an article about fencing.
The article awakened Lacey’s curiosity. She began wondering what had changed in the sport and whether fencing might feel different now. Eventually, she walked into a club and picked up a weapon again.
“It was as fun as I remembered it being when I first started,” she said.
That feeling mattered. Beneath the pressure, disappointment and years away, the original joy had survived.
Her return did not recreate the world she had left. It introduced her to a healthier one. At Northwest Fencing Center and Orion Fencing, she found supportive club cultures, including environments in which women could be ambitious without feeling their value depended upon a single result. Her current coaches and training partners push her to improve, but they also make room for the whole person behind the mask.
The veteran community offered something different as well. Some of the athletes had been Lacey’s rivals when they were younger, but they were no longer the same people they had been at 20. Neither was she. Age had not weakened their competitiveness, but it had changed the way many of them understood one another.
They could fence fiercely, then step away from the strip as friends.
Lacey also returned with a new understanding of from where her strength must come.
“The person that you most have to depend on is yourself,” she said. “No one can hold the weapon for you. No one can think through the problems for you.”
That realization did not make community less important. It allowed her to receive support without surrendering ownership of her fencing. Her coaches and teammates could stand beside her, but they could no longer determine whether she belonged.
Her body changed, as well. She now trains with greater attention to her knees, tendons and recovery. She relies less on the athletic explosiveness of her younger years and more on patience, fundamentals and the mental stability coming from surviving success and loss.
Most importantly, she no longer fences to earn someone else’s approval.
“I get to stab people for fun,” she said. “It’s awesome.”
Lacey calls this chapter her “hero arc.” She also calls it redemption.
The redemption is not simply that she returned to elite competition or earned a place on the Veteran World Team. It is that she reclaimed something she once believed had been taken from her. She can enter a club, pick up an epee and once again experience fencing as a source of joy.
Making the world team is a meaningful achievement, but it is not the ending of Lacey’s story. The greater victory is she came back on her own terms, surrounded by people who support both the athlete and woman holding the weapon.
At one time, Lacey gave fencing everything and nearly lost herself when it could not give her the future she had imagined. Now she has built a life large enough to contain fencing without allowing it to consume her.
Her redemption is not that she finally proved herself worthy of the sport. It is that she discovered she never needed anyone else’s permission to love it.
Tommi Hurme
2026 Vet-40 Men’s Epee Team
Tommi Hurme did not walk away from fencing because he lacked talent, opportunity or support. He had all three.
He grew up in San Antonio in a family shaped by fencing and modern pentathlon. His father had been a world-class Finnish modern pentathlete before immigrating to the United States and winning multiple NCAA titles at New York University. Through his family, Tommi encountered elite athletes and coaches early enough to understand international competition was not an abstract dream. It was a demanding but recognizable path.
Tommi began working formally with a fencing coach at 13. He advanced through the cadet and junior circuits, made the Junior World Team in 2005 and went on to fence epee at Princeton. He qualified for the NCAA Championships three consecutive years and captained the team during a coaching transition.
His family gave him the foundation to pursue fencing seriously. His father’s relationships also opened doors beyond Texas. As a teenager, Tommi traveled to New York and stayed with Olympian and longtime New York Athletic Club member George Masin, giving him access to the kind of high-level training difficult to find at home.
Tommi was hungry for it.
“I did not go through that when I was in my teens or early twenties,” he said when asked about burnout. “I wanted to fence more.”
For many collegiate athletes, graduation marks the natural end of serious competition. Fencing does not always follow that timetable. An epee fencer may continue developing well into adulthood, which means some of the most important athletic decisions arrive at precisely the moment when the rest of life begins demanding financial independence, professional direction and stability.
Tommi graduated during the economic crisis of 2008, when jobs were scarce and the future felt uncertain. Rather than allowing the recession to end his fencing, he found another route. Graduate school gave him a student visa and he moved to Hungary, where he spent four years testing how far his ability could take him.
There, his international career began to accelerate. He competed on the World Cup circuit, broke through to top-64 and top-32 finishes, earned international points and climbed the U.S. rankings. By the 2011–2012 season, he had risen as high as sixth in the country. He came close to earning a place on a Pan American team, only to be edged-out after another American produced a late top-16 World Cup result.
Tommi had not reached the end of his potential. At approximately 25, he was approaching the strongest fencing of his life.
Tommi was offered a place in the men’s epee program at the U.S. Olympic Training Center, an opportunity to commit another four years to pursuing Olympic qualification.
He considered the invitation alongside the other priorities in his life. Off-campus housing would have been expensive, his parents had already supported years of training and competition, and he was weighing his relationships, career and financial independence.
“Four years is another big commitment,” he recalled being reminded. “You are getting older. You need to think about the next steps in your life and your career.”
Tommi decided to move to New York and begin building his professional life. It was a personal decision about what he wanted and could commit to at that point. Other athletes chose to continue the Olympic pursuit, each with their own circumstances and ambitions.
Looking back, Tommi can acknowledge the possibility of another path while recognizing why he chose his own. His relationship with fencing continued to evolve, eventually encompassing coaching, club ownership and a return to international competition through as a veteran.
In New York, fencing gradually moved to the margins of Tommi’s life. He was building a career in a demanding emerging-technology environment, working late and navigating the pressures of the city and an unhappy personal relationship. He continued visiting the club and occasionally entering national competitions, but no longer trained with the structure required to compete at the highest level.
“I was still in love with fencing,” he said, but he was no longer giving it the time necessary to earn results on the Division I circuit.
Tommi’s return began through the woman who is now his spouse, a former modern pentathlete and fellow fencer. Together, they returned to serious training and prepared for the 2017 Division I National Championships. A severe back injury interrupted that first attempt, but it did not end the return.
Tommi and his wife eventually moved to Texas, where he began coaching. What started as another role within the sport became a new professional life. He left a corporate position at Amazon and took over Olympian Fencing Club in San Antonio.
The relationships from Tommi’s senior fencing years remain part of his life today. At Olympian Fencing Club, he has welcomed Jason Pryor and Ben Bratton to lead clinics, bringing their experiences to his students while making time to reconnect as friends. Bratton led a three-day clinic the previous year; Pryor visited for another in September. Tommi also recently reconnected with Jimmy Moody at a national team training camp.
During Pryor’s visit, the two talked about how close Tommi had come to joining the Olympic Training Center program. Pryor had not realized they had nearly become training partners and told Tommi how much he would have valued having him there.
“I had other things going in my life and other pressures that I had to deal with,” Tommi explained.
Their paths had diverged, but the friendship and mutual respect endured. Now, through coaching and collaboration, those connections help Tommi bring another generation into the fencing community that shaped him.
Club ownership created another irony. As his program grew and his lesson schedule filled, Tommi had less time to train himself. He eventually reserved Tuesday nights for fencing with his students. They now benefit from access to an experienced international competitor, while Tommi protects a piece of the athlete he never stopped being.
When Vet-40 competition became available to him, Tommi entered another stage of his fencing life. Many of his opponents were unfamiliar, but several came from the same generation he had known on the junior, collegiate and senior circuits. These were athletes who had also built careers, relationships, families and responsibilities, then found their way back to the strip.
Tommi quickly established himself among the strongest in the field. He won a Vet-40 national championship and qualified for the Veteran World Team in each of the category’s first two seasons.
The athlete who once considered giving four more years entirely to an Olympic campaign now prepares within the responsibilities of a full adult life. He is a husband, father of two, club owner and coach. Every international trip means time away from his family and lessons he cannot give his students. Preparing for a World Championship requires ambition, but also requires negotiation with all the people and responsibilities now sharing his life.
Tommi’s influence has also moved beyond his own results. He serves as the designated coach for the U.S. junior men’s epee team, helping guide athletes standing near the beginning of the same road he traveled.
At his first World Cup with the team in Cairo, the Americans defeated powerful squads from Ukraine and Italy before earning silver against Egypt in front of the host nation’s crowd. For Tommi, the experience was overwhelming. He was no longer the young fencer trying to prove he belonged at that level. He was the coach responsible for helping another generation believe that it did.
Tommi’s fencing life has taken several forms: international competitor, coach, club owner and Veteran World Team member. Choosing a different direction in his twenties became part of that journey. Today, he continues to pursue ambitious goals while making room for his family, his students, and the club he leads.
Craig Harkins
2026 Vet-50 Men’s Foil Team
Craig Harkins arrived at his first national competition after returning to fencing with a private soundtrack and a question.
The song was Miley Cyrus’s “Party in the U.S.A.” The question was whether he still belonged.
“I am going here, but do I belong?” he remembered wondering. “Is this the right place?”
It had been years since Craig competed seriously. He recognized some of the people, understood the rhythms of a national event and could still feel the muscle memory of the athlete he had been. None of that guaranteed the strip would still feel like his place.
Then he began fencing.
“Okay, this is good,” he remembered thinking. “I remember it. This is my spot.”
Craig’s return was not the recovery of a single lost dream. It was the latest stage in a relationship with fencing that had repeatedly changed shape without completely disappearing.
He first discovered the sport at 14 after watching a brief recap of Peter Westbrook winning bronze at the 1984 Olympic Games. Craig was in what he described as his phase of trying every available sport for a season or a year. Fencing looked different enough to deserve a turn.
“That looks cool,” he thought.
He found the Atlanta Fencers Club, took a beginner class and became hooked. Fencing replaced experimentation with commitment. He continued through high school and joined the NCAA team at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
College fencing gave him more than competition. Arriving from out of state, Craig immediately had teammates, friends and a community. The cramped vans and buses in which they traveled became part of an experience that grounded him socially while allowing him to compete nationally.
After college, he continued on the senior circuit to see how far he could go. He reached approximately the top 50 in the United States and earned enough points to compete in a World Cup. He was competitive, but he understood he was not on an Olympic or national-team trajectory.
Looking back, Craig believes fully testing his ceiling would have required moving to New York and becoming what he called a “gym rat” for several years. He chose instead to return to Atlanta and begin his career.
“I did what I could with the constraint I placed on myself,” he said.
The decision was practical, but also reflected his personality. Craig does not enjoy doing something halfway while expecting the result of complete commitment. If he could not give elite fencing the time it demanded, he did not want to remain frustrated by results his training could not support.
“I’m not getting a result because I’m spending more time on career than training,” he realized.
He stepped back from competition, but he did not sever his relationship with the sport. While working for an internet startup and later an internet service provider, Craig created Fencing.net.
The website began as a way to provide news and information at a time when online communities were only beginning to form. It also gave Craig a way to remain connected to fencing when he was no longer organizing his life around his own results.
For a time, that connection was enough.
He concentrated on his career and raising his three sons. He experimented with other sports, including judo, kendo and recreational roller hockey. The activities changed, but the underlying impulse did not. Craig likes learning how something works, establishing a goal and improving until he feels competent.
“When I am doing something, I want to do it to get mastery of it,” he said. “I want to be good at it. I will obsess over it.”
When he reached 40 and became eligible for veteran competition, the category giving instinct somewhere familiar to go. He entered the National Championships in 2011 and won.
But there was no Vet-40 World Championship category at the time. Craig could attend a few North American Cups and compete nationally, but there was no international destination to build towards. Career and family again took precedence, and he stepped away a second time.
The return that lasted began through his youngest son, Asher.
Craig and his wife had made a deliberate decision not to force their children into the activities their parents preferred. His older sons gravitated toward baseball. Asher tried baseball and tennis before attending a fencing camp after the pandemic and discovering he wanted more.
Craig knew the sport, club and coach. He also knew how easily a parent’s history could overshadow a child’s beginning.
He stayed away from the club for approximately a year.
“It’s not that I didn’t want to share with him,” Craig explained. “I didn’t want to overshadow him. I wanted it to be his thing.”
Craig wanted Asher to become a fencer before becoming known primarily as Craig Harkins’s son. He supported the lessons and competitions from a distance while Asher established his own relationship with the sport.
Only after Asher felt secure did he invite his father onto the strip.
“I want to see what I can do against you, Dad,” Craig remembers him saying.
At first, Craig kept his fencing actions simple while working with Asher and the other developing athletes. As they improved and began scoring more touches, he allowed more of his old repertoire to return. Muscle memory would suddenly produce an action that Asher had never seen.
“What the hell did you just do?” Asher would ask.
The bouts became both training and conversation. Asher and his peers improved because Craig could keep presenting more difficult problems. Craig improved because their progress required him to recover more of the fencer he had once been.
“That became a lot of fun and a lot of bonding,” Craig said.
The relationship eventually reversed in another way. At the April North American Cup, Asher strip-coached his father. He could see when Craig needed to slow down or change an action, and Craig trusted the advice because Asher understood both his fencing and the bout unfolding in front of him.
“He helped keep me grounded and in the game enough to get a good result,” Craig said.
There was humor in the reversal. Craig understood from years of parenting that children can resist accurate advice simply because it comes from their father. Asher had even acknowledged that tension. Yet when Asher offered the same kind of direction from the coaching chair, Craig listened.
The son whom Craig had protected from his shadow had become one of the people helping him step fully back into the light.
Craig returned to national competition in 2025 initially intending to discover whether he could still compete at that level. His first strong result gave him an unexpected possibility: he might be able to make the Veteran World Team.
That possibility immediately became a problem.
After the successful event, Craig began calculating qualification points and thinking about where he and the other contenders needed to finish. Instead of remaining inside the bout, part of his mind was already measuring what each result might mean.
“I cared,” he said.
The harder he pursued the outcome, the tighter he fenced. His next two results became progressively worse, and he finished the season outside the team in sixth place.
The following season, Craig changed the goal occupying his attention. Making the team still mattered, but he stopped trying to fence the qualification standings while an opponent was standing in front of him.
“If I perform well, the result will happen,” he told himself.
Instead of asking where he would finish, he reduced the tournament to the next bout and next opponent. He already knew how to fence. The more difficult task was keeping his mind open enough to use what he knew.
The change carried him onto the 2026 Veteran World Team in Vet-50 Men’s Foil, his first qualification for Veteran Worlds.
Earning the place did not lessen his ambition. It gave the ambition a more productive direction.
“I’m not going to Tbilisi for a vacation,” Craig said. “I’m going to compete in a tournament and do as well as I can.”
His preparation was more intentional than when he was younger. He tracked his strength work, maintained a cardiovascular base and planned the progression from conditioning into lessons, technical training and bouting before tapering ahead of the Championships. His goal was to make his final bout of the day as strong as his first.
Age also requires restraint. Recovery is slower, joints demand greater attention and overtraining could destroy the opportunity before reaching the strip. Craig’s greatest challenge is not persuading himself to work. It is preventing his desire for mastery from pushing him too hard, too soon.
He is also adapting to the compressed psychology of veteran competition. A ten-touch direct-elimination bout provides little time to recover from a poor start. Two touches represent 20 percent of the score.
To prepare, Craig divides 15-touch practice bouts in his own mind. He fences the first ten touches as one bout, then treats the remaining five as another exercise. His younger opponents may be fencing to 15, but Craig is rehearsing the urgency he will encounter at Veteran Worlds.
Mentally, he is trying to balance what he jokingly calls fear and arrogance. The nervousness reminds him the event matters. The confidence tells him he earned the right to be there.
“I know what I am doing,” he said. “I am going to come in and try to impose my will on the bout.”
Asher was not in Tbilisi to coach him. He is beginning his freshman year and fencing at Cleveland State University, learning to manage college, academics and a new team. Craig understands why his son had to remain at school, although Asher was disappointed that he cannot make the trip.
His absence did not make him missing from the story.
Asher’s decision to choose fencing reopened the sport for Craig. Craig’s decision to wait allowed Asher to own that choice. Only then could father and son meet on the strip as two fencers, each capable of teaching, challenging and grounding one another.
Lacey Biniak returned because she needed to reclaim the joy that pressure and damaged trust had nearly taken from her. Tommi Hurme returned to discover that the Olympic path he declined was not the only meaningful future fencing could offer.
Craig returned because his son first made the sport his own and then invited his father to share it.
The invitation ultimately carried Craig farther than either of them expected. Asher began his first collegiate season while Craig represented USA at his first Veteran World Championships.
Craig once gave his son room to become a fencer without standing in his way.
Now the son has helped the father find his way back.