Dear #IviesinRio: A Letter

Robin Harris
Aug 5, 2016
2 min read

Robin Harris with Cornell's Stephen Mozia, 2016 Olympian

I want to wish all of you, current and former Ivy League coaches and students, the best of luck at the 2016 Summer Olympic Games in Rio. Thank you for all the hard work you have put in, on and off the field of play. I know you will all represent yourselves, your families and your countries extremely well and I’m very excited to watch you on the world stage.

This year you will be part of a contingent of 65 Ivy League representatives at the Olympic Games, the most we have ever sent to a single Olympics, and the sixth-most of any conference in collegiate athletics.

The Ivy League has a long history of success at the Olympics across a variety of sports, with over 1,000 athletes winning more than 460 medals from the first Summer Games in 1896 to London in 2012. I expect you will all continue that tradition at this year’s Summer Games.

In fact, the very first Olympics in 1896 in Athens saw an American team of just 12 men, all from Columbia, Harvard or Princeton. That year, the Crimson’s James B. Connolly won the triple jump to become the first person to be crowned Olympic champion since the ancient Greek Games over 1,500 years prior. Penn’s John Baxter Taylor, Jr., became the first African American to win a gold medal, as part of USA’s winning sprint medley relay team in 1908. The 1920 Olympics featured an all-Ivy final in the freestyle featherweight wrestling gold medal match, with Cornell’s Charles “Ed” Ackerly defeating Penn’s Samuel N. Gerson. In 1932, Brown’s Helen Johns, at age 17, was a part of the USA women's swimming gold-medal winning 4x100m relay team. She went on to serve as a torchbearer for the 1996 Olympic Games in Atlanta.

Columbia’s Norman Armitage competed in the Olympics six times, from 1928-36 and then again from 1948-56, and in the latter two he served as the US flag bearer. Yale’s Frank Shorter to this day remains the only American to win two medals in the marathon, taking gold in 1972 and silver in 1976. Princeton’s Nelson Diebel set a world record en route to the gold medal in the 100-yard breaststroke in 1992 and added a second gold to his tally as part of the USA medley-relay team. Dartmouth’s Dana Chladek won two medals for the US in kayak, taking bronze in 1992 and silver four years later. Also in that 1996 Olympics, Columbia’s Cristina Teuscher became the first Ivy to swim for Team USA since 1972, winning gold with the 4x200m freestyle relay team; she then won bronze in the 200m IM in 2000. Brown’s Alicia Sacramone became the first Ivy to win a gymnastics medal as an undergraduate in 104 years when she helped Team USA claim silver in 2008, and three former members of the Princeton women’s rowing team reached the podium in 2012, as Caroline Lind won gold with USA, while Andreanne Morin and Lauren Wilkinson took home silver with Canada.