Meet Fencing’s Power Couple Lee Kiefer and Gerek Meinhardt
The married Olympians are taking a break from med school to compete in Paris. No big deal.
Olympic fencers Lee Kiefer and Gerek Meinhardt call their marriage their “secret weapon.”
“We can help push each other through all the ups and downs,” Kiefer says.
The couple, who started dating during the London Games back in 2012 and got married in 2019, are set to compete in the Paris Olympics together, marking the fourth Olympics for Kiefer, 30, and the fifth for Meinhardt, 34.
They’re preparing for what possibly could be their last games, and looking toward to their future careers in medicine—because as they’ve climbed to the upper echelons of fencing, Kiefer and Meinhardt are also medical school students at the University of Kentucky.
“Both of us thought we were going to retire at 22,” Kiefer tells Town & Country. “I’m 30, and he’s turning 34, and we’re really proud that [we’re still competing], to be honest. For most of our careers, we were the young ones—those surprising results, those people who they didn’t see coming.
We were out there no hesitation, no expectations. And then one day, it flips and you’re the leaders on the team and people are like, ‘oh, maybe they’re going to get worse instead of better!’ You just find what you like about the sport. We love doing it together.”
Meinhardt agrees, adding, “Even six years ago, I wasn’t the oldest fencer and I wasn’t the youngest, but I still felt like an underdog—maybe that’s part of why I’ve been successful. I always feel a little bit like an underdog.
I always wanted to prove something.
Now it’s very clear that I’m the veteran on the circuit, so I can’t have that mindset, in some ways. But it’s flipped: Now I’m like, oh, I want to prove that I’m not this old washed up guy.”
Whether or not they decide to retire after Paris, they will be part of American fencing history: In Beijing in 2008, Meinhardt became the youngest U.S. Olympic fencer of all time at age 17—he’s since won two bronze medals in the team competition—and in Tokyo in 2021, Kiefer became the first American foil fencer in history, male or female, to win an individual gold medal
