ZAGUNIS Mariel

General
NO STOPPING YET
After returning to fencing in 2018 following a break to give birth to her daughter, she said she planned to keep fencing until at least the 2020 Olympic Games in Tokyo. "Tokyo right now is a big goal. I can't wait for it to get here and see what I can do. After that, we'll see. I like to think that I'm changing the paradigm. In the US, [the thinking was that] you could only fence through college. There was no such thing as being a professional. Once you hit your mid to late twenties, it wasn't feasible to be a professional fencer, especially if you have a baby. I'm changing all of that. I don't think there is a limit to how old you can be. I'm not focused on making history, but I want to win more Olympic medals." (pamplinmedia.com, 05 Jul 2018)

MATERNITY BREAK
She took a year off fencing to give birth to her daughter, Sunday, in October 2017. She returned to competition in 2018 at the Grand Prix event in Seoul, Republic of Korea. "The extended break helped. There aren't enough hours in the day to train like I used to, but maybe at my age, and at this time in my life, it's a blessing in disguise, because I feel fantastic. I wanted her [Sunday] to have a unique name, so she wouldn't be one of those kids who has six classmates with the same name. My husband wouldn't let me get too weird with it. It had to be unique, but not weird. I heard the name and thought, 'Sunday, that's perfect'." (pamplinmedia.com, 05 Jul 2018)

OTHER ACTIVITIES
In August 2017 she became a member of the athletes' commission with the International Fencing Federation [FIE]. (fie.org, 04 Aug 2017)

Her victory in individual sabre at the 2004 Olympic Games in Athens made her the first US female fencer to claim an Olympic gold medal, and the second US fencer to win Olympic gold after Albertson Van Zo Post's first gold for the United States of America at the 1904 Games. When she won gold in the same event four years later at the 2008 Games in Beijing, she became the first US fencer to win more than one Olympic gold medal. (usfencing.org, 20 Jun 2017; SportsDeskOnline, 22 Jun 2018)

She was the first US fence to win more than two world championship gold medals [individual or team] when she claimed her third world title in 2009. She went on to become the first US fencer to win four [2010] and five [2014] world titles, and was also the first US fencer to win more than one individual world title, when she claimed back-to-back gold medals in 2009 and 2010 in individual sabre. (SportsDeskOnline, 19 Jun 2019)

At the 2015 Pan American Championships in Santiago, Chile, she became the first fencer from any nation to win six individual Pan American titles. (SportsDeskOnline, 01 Jun 2019)