LEXINGTON, Ky. — Lee Kiefer had a meticulously designed game plan leading into the 2020 Summer Olympics.
The Lexington-based foil fencer was going to take a year off from her studies at the University of Kentucky College of Medicine.
She was going to focus exclusively on training so she would be in top form for the Tokyo games.
Then the coronavirus pandemic intervened.
“Everyone definitely had to make adjustments in their job,” Kiefer said Wednesday via a video conferencing app. “For me, I was ready to go to Tokyo, then just focus on my medical career.”
Instead, due to the COVID-19-inspired restrictions, Kiefer found herself with no place to train — and no certainty there would even be an Olympics to train for.
At least when you are a world-class fencer whose training schedule is sabotaged by a global pandemic, it helps to be married to another elite athlete in your sport.
Amid last year’s shutdown, Kiefer and her husband, Team USA fencing star Gerek Meinhardt, could fall back on each other for a training partner.
“My husband and I built a fencing strip in my parents’ basement,” Kiefer said. “We would train there a few times a week. Just try to maintain some of our skills a little bit until, we hoped, the world would open back up ... and the Olympics would happen.”
The improvised, wife-and-husband training regimen of 2020 proved successful enough that, when the foil fencing competition at the rescheduled XXXII Olympiad commences later this summer (the games will run July 23 through Aug. 8) in Tokyo, both Kiefer and Meinhardt will be competing.
Each will seek to medal as individuals, then as part of team competitions.
For Kiefer, the 2012 Lexington Paul Laurence Dunbar High School graduate, Tokyo will be her third Olympics.
In 2012, as a bright-eyed teenager, Kiefer finished fifth in foil fencing as an individual at the London Games.
“I just showed up, bopped around a little bit, had so much fun,” Kiefer says.
Four years later, Kiefer entered the Rio Olympics ranked as the No. 3 female foil fencer in the world. That brought medal expectations and a different kind of pressure.
“I did feel pressure like, ‘This is my time to show everyone and get a medal,’” Kiefer says.
Instead of reaching the medal stand, Kiefer was upset in her second bout by China’s Yongshi Liu, who had entered the 2016 Olympics ranked No. 30 in the world.
“That’s part of the Olympics. It can be anyone’s day,” Kiefer says.
If Kiefer, who turned 27 Tuesday, can make the Tokyo Olympics her “day,” it will fill the void of the one major achievement missing from what has been a stellar fencing career.
Kiefer’s journey to becoming a three-time Olympian began at age 5. That is when her father, Steven Kiefer, a Lexington neurosurgeon and one-time captain of the Duke University fencing team, started to teach his children the sport he loved in the family dining room.
Eventually, Steven and Teresa Oropilla-Kiefer’s kids made Lexington into a fencing hot spot.
The Kiefers’ oldest child, daughter Alexandra, won the 2011 NCAA championship in foil fencing for Harvard. The youngest, son Axel, was NCAA runner-up competing for Notre Dame in foil fencing in 2019.
Middle child Lee has risen the highest as a foil fencer. She won the NCAA championship in that discipline four times at Notre Dame.
(The interview with Lee Kiefer that is the basis for this column was arranged through one of her sponsors, The Dairy Alliance.)
What is referred to as “The Olympics Model” — in which athletes have the opportunity to benefit financially from their sports fame — is what many of us have long advocated for major-college athletes.
I asked Kiefer if she wishes she could have reaped benefits from her name, image and likeness in her time as Notre Dame’s star fencer.
“I think if I had had that opportunity, I would have taken it when I was younger,” she said. “I am not really sure how to speak to how that might have changed where I am today and the impact it will have.”)
Lee Kiefer has medaled four times in the World Championships, including a 2018 team gold medal.
In 2017, she became the first American woman to rise to No. 1 in the world rankings in foil fencing.
What is missing is an Olympics medal. “I guess that rings a little bit true,” Kiefer says.
Though Kiefer has previously spoken of the Tokyo Games as being her final shot at Olympics glory, she is now leaving the door open to possibly continuing in international fencing competition beyond this year even as she works to complete medical school at UK.
“The older I get, the less I know (about the future). I love fencing,” Kiefer says. “I think U.S. Fencing, the U.S. Olympic Committee, they have more resources (than in the past) and help encourage longer careers for more obscure sports like fencing — which is really cool.”
Kiefer will enter Tokyo ranked as the top American female foil fencer and No. 5 in the world. Her husband, Meinhardt, 30, will enter the Olympic Games ranked No. 2 in the world among male foil fencers.
The dream goal in Tokyo for her household, Kiefer says, is four gold medals — one each for wife and husband in both foil fencing individual and team competitions.
Standing on the Olympics medal stand would be quite a trip from training in the basement of Kiefer’s parents last year at the height of the pandemic.
“I think I’m stronger, smarter, more experienced than I have been in the past (Olympics),” Lee Kiefer says. “I’m feeling good. I’m ready to go to Tokyo.”
