Team USA Fencers Wear White Jackets, On And Off The Strip: 'Everyone’s A Doctor'

Lee Kiefer is at the height of her athletic career. 

She’s also at the height of her medical studies.

Three years agoat the Olympic Games Tokyo 2020, Kiefer won gold in foil fencing, the first U.S. win ever in that discipline. A three-time Olympian, she thought that triumph would be her swan song.

“I had decided that I really wanted to fence after Tokyo, but I didn’t think it was possible,” Kiefer, 30, said. “I thought, ‘I have to go back to school, and they won’t let me take more time (off) to fence.’”

As it turned out, after some serious conversations with the powers that be at the University of Kentucky College of Medicine, where Kiefer is in her third year, she was able to add a fourth Olympics to her resume. She’ll compete at the Olympic Games Paris 2024 later this month.

“I think, because I got a medal, it was easier for me to justify (an Olympic return),” she said. 

The Lexington, Kentucky, resident isn’t the only one in her family balancing the art of fencing with the art of medicine. Gerek Meinhardt, whom she wed in 2019, is in his second year at UK Medicine. Like Kiefer, the two-time Olympic bronze medalist in team foil is taking some time away from his studies to prepare for Paris.

“Lee and I have both been on leaves of absence, because it was so challenging (to fence and study),” Meinhardt, 34 said. “Thankfully, this past year, we’ve been able to just focus on the fencing and get more sleep. I still caffeinate because I like to, not so that I can survive the two.”

The couple’s balancing act is remarkable, and yet it’s not unusual in fencing.

Kat Holmes, who is set to compete in her third Olympics in women’s epee, began her studies at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai in New York City in 2021. She aspires to an orthopedics specialty.

“I started doing world cups when I was 15, and my parents always made it very clear to me that school comes first,” Holmes, 31, said. “So I was like, ‘Well, I guess I need to get the grades.’ And so I learned how to balance academics and athletics from a young age.”

Then there’s Margherita Guzzi Vincenti, another member of the women’s epee team, who graduated from Penn State University with a pre-med degree and hopes for a career as a cardiologist. She has done volunteer research work at Walter Reed National Military Medical Center. Foil fencer Maia Weintraub, still an undergraduate at Princeton University, is considering a molecular biology major. 

These athletes are only the most recent to wear white jackets both on the strip, and in the lab. Eliza Stone, a 2020 Olympian in saber, has embarked on a military medical career at the Uniformed Services University School of Medicine in Maryland. Kamali Thompson, an alternate for that 2020 women’s saber team, attended medical school throughout much of her career and is now an orthopedic surgery resident at Temple University Hospital in Philadelphia.

Each person has a unique story. But Weintraub muses that good fencers are, by nature, problem solvers — and so are students of the sciences.

“Fencing is one of those sports that doesn’t just require raw physicality,” the 21-year-old said. “You could be fencing someone who maybe has a natural gift, but if you think systematically and problem solve, I feel it’s anyone’s game.”

For Kiefer, the fencing-medical school connection lies close to home.

“My parents are both doctors,” she said. “My siblings are both doctors, my grandma is a doctor, everyone’s a doctor.”

With Olympic gold already in her pocket, and medical school beckoning, people often ask Kiefer why she continues to compete.

“We have a really good team,” she said of the women’s foil squad, currently ranked No. 2 in the world. “All the girls who qualified for the Olympics have individually medaled at world cups. We’ve won team events, which had not been the case before. I think it would be freaking awesome to take home a team gold, and that hasn’t been done before.”

Another factor keeping Kiefer and Meinhardt in the Games is the support they offer each other.

“We have a lot of tournaments together, and obviously the Olympics works great,” Meinhardt said. “You’ve got to be there cheering for each other. And when we aren’t together at the same tournament, we know what each other is going through.”

Kiefer calls fencing both the “strength and the weakness” of their relationship.

“We know what the other person needs to do to get better emotionally,” she said. “But at the same time, if one of us is going through a down period — which is so normal in fencing — or you’re injured or just battling with something, that other person takes on that burden, too. That affects your life. But overall, it is a strength.”

Holmes’ fencing experience fed her ambitions for an orthopedics career. After graduating from Princeton University with a bachelor’s in neuroscience, she took a scholarly year to conduct biomechanical research, much of it involving her sport.

“All of my research is based on fencing — injuries, biomechanics, understanding the sport — and so as difficult and challenging as balancing (studies and fencing) has been, they’ve also really worked together into a kind of universal passion for me,” she said.

Holmes, who serves as chair of USA Fencing’s Athlete Advisory Council and as an athlete representative to the USOPC’s Athlete Advisory Council, reaches out to members of USA Fencing with surveys inquiring about injuries. The data helps inform her research, as does data collected by the Olympic and Paralympic training centers.

“We did a study looking at the impact course of the launch on fencing in different strips, to try to find out what the best flooring for lunging will be at competitions,” she said of one of her studies. “The goal is to try and minimize that impact on the hip and knee.” 

Another study involves doing a 360-degree motion capture, to understand the different joint angles in fencers and why different fencers tend to have different injuries.

“Maybe if we understand the en garde position, the way that fencers advance, retreat and lunge, we can have a better concept of injury mechanisms,” Holmes said. “Really, there’s not much in the field of fencing sports medicine at all, and I want to help try to build that future to try to understand our sport better.”