The medical student who can’t stop winning gold medals

There may not be anyone on Team USA having a better Olympics than someone who already arrived in Paris as one of the most successful fencers of all time.

First she claimed the gold medal in the women’s foil individual event on Saturday. Then she led the women’s foil squad to a historic team gold on Thursday night.

At the last Olympics, she became the first American to win individual foil gold. At this Olympics, she was part of the first U.S. fencing team to win gold. Kiefer now has three gold medals, the most of anyone in Team USA fencing history.

And by far the most of anyone in the University of Kentucky’s medical school.

Before she became a double Olympic champion, it was Kiefer’s plan to have a stethoscope around her neck instead of a bunch of medals. But after finishing two years of medical school, she’s been on a leave of absence since 2021. She has said she plans to return to her studies next year and will spend the next few months recuperating from her time in Paris.

All of which means Kiefer has to figure out when to trade her sword for a scalpel.

She won’t be the first Olympian who stabs people before saving their lives. As it turns out, there are many American fencers who become doctors when their careers are done. Some of them are members of her own family. The difference is Kiefer is still one of the best fencers in the world—and she’s only gotten better since enrolling in medical school.

Kiefer likes to say that fencing and medicine is all she has ever known since she was born. Today, just about everyone in Kiefer’s life is a doctor or a fencer. Most of them are both.

Her father is a neurosurgeon. Her mother is a psychiatrist. Her older sister is an OB-GYN and her younger brother is a psychiatry resident.

“If anyone has any medical needs, we have you covered," Kiefer said.

“We could have an HMO," added Steve Kiefer, her father.

They also could have a killer fencing team. Kiefer, 30, grew up in Kentucky training at the Bluegrass Fencers Club and competing on the international circuit. But she didn’t have to travel the world to find training partners. She didn’t even have to step outside. Her father fenced at Duke, her sister at Harvard and her brother at Notre Dame, where Kiefer was a four-time NCAA individual champion—and a pre-med.

Now she lives with another champion fencer, Gerek Meinhardt, a five-time Olympian and two-time medalist for Team USA.

Oh, right. He’s also in med school with Kiefer.

“It’s like almost the path of least resistance was to do fencing and then medical school," said Kiefer’s sister, Alex. “That’s just what we knew."

Lee competed at the Olympics in London and Rio and thought about retiring from being a fencer to focus on being a physician. She ultimately decided to keep doing both and go for Tokyo.

Then she won the gold medal.

Standing atop the podium only solidified her decision to keep fencing, and the medical school granted her an extended leave of absence. By then, she had finished her pre-clinical work, she says, and not even a Kiefer could find the time to work in a hospital while training for another Olympics.

The decision paid off when she came to Paris ranked No. 1 in the world, but there were no guarantees that she would end up on the podium again.

Then she won another gold medal.

This week, the spectacular Grand Palais was so Américain that it might as well have been wearing jorts.

Kiefer and Lauren Scruggs draped themselves in the flag and climbed the medal stand after taking gold and silver in the individual event. A few nights later, Kiefer and Scruggs were on the same side of the strip, along with teammates Jackie Dubrovich and Maia Weintraub, as the Americans in stars-and-stripes masks found themselves back atop the podium. Once again, Kiefer was statistically the most dominant fencer in the entire field.

When asked what comes next, Kiefer parried the question.

She’s at the top of her game with a chance to three-peat on home piste when the Summer Games come to Los Angeles in 2028. But four years is a long time in fencing. It’s so long, in fact, that the next time she competes at the Olympics, the defending champion might even be known by a different name: Dr. Kiefer.