Yury Gelman

Yury Gelman (born October 13, 1955) is a Ukrainian-born American fencing coach. He is seven-time Olympic fencing coach for the United States, who has coached Team USA in the 2000 Sydney, 2004 Athens, 2008 Beijing, 2012 London, 2016 Rio, 2020 Tokyo, and 2024 Paris Olympics, and US National Men's Saber Coach. Through July 2024, he had coached 19 fencers who became Olympians, six of whom won Olympic medals. Gelman also served as coach of the Ukrainian Fencing Team from 1987 to 1991.

He has also served as Head Fencing Coach for St. John's University for three decades, during which time he has coached 26 NCAA individual champions, and 140 All-Americans. The team won the 2001 NCAA Fencing Championship. Gelman is the founder of the Manhattan Fencing Center in New York City and in Englewood, New Jersey.

Gelman, who is Jewish, was born in Kyiv, Ukrainian SSR, Soviet Union (now Ukraine), to Wolf and Malvina Gelman. His maternal grandmother was Esther Krakovitch. Wolf and his sister were the only members of their family who survived the Nazi massacre of Jews in the village of Gaisen, Ukraine.

Gelman started fencing at the age of 10, and enjoyed the strategic element of the sport; he said: "I enjoy setting a trap and feeling like, OK, I’m a little bit better. He’s stronger, but I’m smarter." He fenced foil for the first two years, and then switched weapons and developed into a top saber fencer, winning two Ukrainian championships. He fenced in high school, during his year and a half of military service in the army, and in college.

He graduated in 1977 from Piddubny Olympic College (Kiev Ukrainian Academy of Sport), with a degree in physical education and coaching of fencing. In 1981 Gelman earned a Master of Sports degree in physical education from the college.

Gelman began teaching fencing to elite athletes in Ukraine. He first began coaching at Piddubny Olympic College after he graduated from the college, and he coached there from 1977 to 1991. Gelman also served as coach of the Ukrainian Fencing Team from 1987 to 1991.

Gelman immigrated to the United States on November 1, 1991, when he was 36 years of age, just before the collapse of the Soviet Union. The driving force for him was that doctors had identified skin complications suffered by his daughter as being due to the effects of the Chernobyl disaster, and advised that her climate should be changed.

He moved first to Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, working odd jobs there, including washing dishes; a step down from his life in Kiev, where he had had a private driver. Then in 1993 he moved to New York. He was not able to find work in the US in fencing straight away, so he spent a year-and-a-half selling doughnuts that he made himself - along with coffee and tea - at a flea market alongside a New Jersey highway. He now lives in Brooklyn, New York.