Quick Facts
Biography
Daryl Homer (born July 16, 1990) is an American Olympic saber fencer.
He competed in the 2012 Summer Olympics and the 2016 Summer Olympics. He won the silver medal in individual saber at the 2016 Olympics. He was also a silver medalist at the 2015 World Fencing Championships, and is a five-time gold medalist at the Pan American Fencing Championships.
Personal life
Homer was born on St. Thomas, U.S. Virgin Islands to Juliette Smith and Daryl Homer. At the age of 5, Homer moved to New York City with his mother and younger sister D’Meca, to an apartment on Gun Hill Road in the Bronx. While there, Homer attended Public School 21, transferred to Friends Seminary after receiving a scholarship, and eventually graduated from St. John’s University with a degree in advertising communications. He now works for advertising and marketing agency Anomaly.
Homer regularly 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 give to students in some of the most impoverished neighborhoods. The program has trained teachers in Utah, Chicago, Newark, New York City, and Vermont. One of his cousins is Jonathan Homer and Dave Samson.
Fencing career
Homer started fencing at the age of eleven, after happening on a picture of a masked fencer in the dictionary, and finding it "very cool". 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. Homer chose saber because Westbrook himself had been a sabreur.
Homer was quickly identified as a talented athlete, and began working with four-time Olympic coach Yury Gelman immediately. He won a bronze medal at the 2007 Cadet World Fencing Championships, and another bronze at the 2009 Junior World Championships in Belfast. That same year he competed in his first senior World Championships in Antalya, finishing 23rd, and took the NCAA title as a sophomore.
In the 2009–10 season Homer defended successfully his NCAA title. At the 2010 World Championships in Paris he defeated successively France's Boladé Apithy and Nicolas Lopez to reach the round of 16, and finished 12th. The next season he won the gold medal at the 2011 Pan American Championships, after prevailing in the final over Canada's Vincent Couturier.
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. In the team event, the USA lost to Russia in the quarter-finals and finished eighth. He finished the 2011–12 season no. 12 in FIE rankings.
Homer maintained this ranking in the next season thanks to three quarter-final placings in the World Cup and a bronze medal at the 2013 Pan American Championships. He placed 11th at the end of the 2013–14 season. In the 2014–15 season he climbed his first World Cup podium with a bronze medal in the Seoul Grand Prix.
As of July 1, 2016, he was ranked #2 in the United States, behind Team USA teammate Eli Dershwitz.
He competed for the United States in fencing at the 2016 Summer Olympics. He won the silver medal.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.