Homer is a ten-time team Pan American champion and three-time individual Pan American champion.
Personal life
Homer was born on St. Thomas, U.S. Virgin Islands, to Juliette Smith and Daryl Homer.[3] At the age of five, Homer moved to New York City with his mother and younger sister D’Meca, to an apartment on Gun Hill Road in the Bronx. Homer attended Public School 21 there before going to Salesian High School[4] in New Rochelle. He eventually graduated from St. John’s University, with a degree in advertising communications. He now works for advertising and marketing agency Anomaly.[3]
Homer speaks to inner city youth about balancing his career with his athletic passions. He is a brand ambassador at Fencing in the Schools, a non-profit that aims to enrich the lives of students in the inner city through fencing. The program focuses on the health benefits, life skills, and exposure fencing can provide students in impoverished neighborhoods.[citation needed]
Fencing career
Homer started fencing at the age of 11, after happening on a picture of a masked fencer in the dictionary, and finding it "very cool".[5] He joined the Peter Westbrook Foundation in New York City, a program dedicated to exposing inner city youth to fencing started by six-time Olympian and 1984 Olympic bronze medalist Peter Westbrook.[3] Homer chose saber because Westbrook himself had been a sabreur.[5]
He redshirted the following season to train for the 2012 Summer Olympics, for which he qualified as a member of the top-ranked team of the Americas zone. In the individual event he defeated 15–9 Romania's Tiberiu Dolniceanu in the first round, then had a narrow 15–14 victory of world No. 2, Russia's Aleksey Yakimenko. He lost 15–14 in the quarter-finals to another Romanian, Rareș Dumitrescu, and finished sixth.[6] In the team event, the USA lost to Russia in the quarter-finals and finished eighth.[6] He finished the 2011–12 season no. 12 in FIE rankings.
As of July 1, 2016, he was ranked #2 in the United States, behind Team USA teammate Eli Dershwitz.[8]
He competed for the United States in fencing at the 2016 Summer Olympics.[9] He won the silver medal.[10] He became the first U.S. medalist in men's saber since Peter Westbrook won a bronze medal in 1984 and the first U.S. men's silver medalist since William Grebe in 1904. The U.S. has never won gold in men's saber.[11] Shortly after his Olympic silver medal, he left long-time coach Yury Gelman and the Manhattan Fencing Center for another coach.
This page is based on this Wikipedia article Text is available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 license; additional terms may apply. Images, videos and audio are available under their respective licenses.
United States 
