Lee Kiefer made her Olympic fencing debut about two months after graduating from high school, as a wide-eyed 18-year-old with no expectations and no worries − “a baby,” she said, at least by Olympic standards.
Fast forward 12 years and it feels like everything has changed.
Kiefer, 30, is now the reigning Olympic gold medalist in women’s foil and arguably the face of the sport in the United States. Since her first trip to the Games, she’s graduated from college, enrolled in medical school, gotten married, traveled the world and, most recently, started picking up shifts as a help-line volunteer at a Kentucky non-profit that helps people in the state get access to abortion care.
Kiefer knows her fencing career is closer to its end than its beginning − though she also bristles at the idea of being beholden to some arbitrary timeline.
“I think people are just trying to rush me to outcomes,” she told USA TODAY Sports, “where the journey is super important, too.”
The next stop in that journey, of course, is Paris, where Kiefer will enter her fourth Olympics as the prohibitive favorite to win gold once again.
In 2021, the Kentucky native became the first American to win an Olympic medal in individual foil − one of the three disciplines in a sport that dates back to the original iteration of the Games. She said she thought about retiring and shifting her focus back to medical school after those Olympics but ultimately decided to give it another go. And in the three years since, she’s been entrenched as the No. 1 ranked women’s foil athlete in the world.
Kiefer said she and her husband, fellow U.S. fencer Gerek Meinhardt, never expected to still be fencing at this level at this point in their lives. And while she won’t say whether she thinks these Olympics will be her last, she acknowledged that she is definitely approaching Paris with a different perspective − trying to be more present during the whole experience, soaking up little moments and memories along the way.
“I do want time to slow down,” Kiefer said. “That is for sure.”
