Ivies in China

Photo credit: Guideposts Magazine

Yesterday we ran a story about Right to Play.

Continuing that theme, today we are going to highlight one of the prominent fixtures of that particular organization.

Perhaps you already know about the story: former in-line skater becomes speed skater and competes at Olympic Games. Said speed skater wins medals of every color at Games and  — in one fell swoop — becomes one of the greatest humanitarian athletes of our generation. Simply by announcing that he would donate the $25,000 gold medal bonus of his 500 meter triumph to the international humanitarian organization — Right to Play — run by former Olympic champion Johann Olav Koss.  

Said speed skater also donates an additional $15,000 to the athlete-driven organization after the 1,000 meter race and then encourages others to make similar pledges.

You may even remember the speed skater’s name: Joey Cheek.

What you may not remember was that in Turin, Cheek was elected by his teammates to carry the United States flag during the closing ceremonies. Such an honor is bestowed on the athlete that the contingent feels most personifies the Olympic ideal. For his steadfast beliefs and unrivaled generosity, Cheek was chosen.

But as the book of Torino 2006 closed, the legend of Joey Cheek grew. In the new day of athletes that convey a “me-first” mentality, Cheek’s actions were a welcomed change; a breath of fresh air. He became a phenomenon to television talk shows; a champion to news mediums around the globe. A hero.

He also became a Princeton student (’11).

For more about Joey Cheek, head here.

…it would be the biggest group of overachievers in Beijing.

ESPN’s Pat Forde did the dirty work to calculate that the greatest overachiever in the 2008 Games was Zimbabwe, which had thirteen athletes participating while taking home four medals; one medal for every 3.3 athletes.

Assuming that Mr. Forde is right… means that he is, of course, wrong. This is because the mighty Ivy Nation would take the top spot.

Simple math: 42 athletes and 14 medals equals one medal for every 3 (< 3.3) athletes.

We think you should let Mr. Forde know about his error.

Nice work Ivies!

It is with great pleasure to announce that the little website that could (Ivies in China) has hit a major milestone.

If we may be honest: our goal for this website was to have 25,000 (roughly to average around 1,000 hits per day) viewers. When that goal was surpassed as Yao Ming watched the fireworks display to close the Opening ceremonies, we put forth an extremely ambitious goal of an additional 25,000 hits during the 16 days of competition.

And with your help we have achieved it! At 7:20 pm EST, August 24th, 2008, Ivies in China had its 50,000th visitor!

Thank you to everybody that was involved with this venture.  From the fans that continually came to the site to consume the information that we had provided, to the media outlets (including New York Magazine, CNN.com, Deadspin, SI.com) that noted what we were doing and provided links to our stories, and finally to our boss for allowing us to have free reign with this… we would not (we could not) have been as successful.

As a final note, we have updated all of the athlete bios and medal counts to reflect Beijing totals. Additionally, our work is not done… currently we know of two athletes participating in the 2008 Paralympic Games and we will follow the progress of those athletes as well. We will also have a very special feature about one of our most famous Olympians (that you may not even know is an Ivy student) in the next few days.

Additionally, if you missed anything over the course of the Games, just click on the calendar in the right drop down menu and click on the corresponding day.

More than 40 years since taking the college basketball world by storm, he remains the face of the Ivy League. And that has nothing to do with his service as a United States Senator or his run for President.

For Bill Bradley, the seeds of Princeton and the Ivy League were planted at an early age. “Other people on the sandlot wanted to be ‘Hopalong’ Cassidy of Ohio State and I wanted to be Dick Kazmaier of Princeton,” recalls the Basketball Hall of Famer, referring to the 1951 Heisman Trophy winner.

The other resonating image for Bradley as a youngster was seeing Yale’s John Lee grace the cover of a 1957 issue of Sports Illustrated. “That had a kind of reorienting effect on me because it told me you could get the best education and, at the same time, compete against the best.”

But the greatest basketball player ever to play in the Ivy League almost didn’t end up there. One of the most celebrated players in Missouri high school basketball history, Bradley received more than 70 scholarship offers before originally deciding on Duke. Soon after, he suffered a broken foot playing baseball, an injury that caused the high school senior to contemplate a life without the game that had come to consume his life.

“I thought to myself, ‘Well, where would I go if I didn’t play basketball?’”

“The Princeton freshman class was supposed to convene on a Monday and the Duke freshman class on a Wednesday,” remembers Bradley. “On the previous Friday I came home from a date and I woke my parents up and told them I had changed my mind.”

Bradley’s impact was felt immediately and Princeton basketball would never be the same.

In his 1965 book A Sense of Where You Are, Pulitzer Prize winning author John McPhee tells the story of the first time he saw Bradley play in a freshman game against Penn. McPhee describes a sold out Dillon Gym with “a large crowd outside.”

They were there to see Bradley, who would score more than 30 points a game for the freshman team. During one stretch, he connected on 57 consecutive free throws – a mark then unmatched by any other player, college or professional.

Bradley’s complete profile can be found at Ivy@50.

Walkons usually don’t even dream of winning individual national titles, but Meredith Rainey Valmon was hardly the usual walk-on. Her track career at Harvard took her even further than two NCAA Championships

When Meredith Rainey Valmon met with Harvard Track & Field Coach Frank Haggerty in his office in November of 1986, he was a skeptic.

“I was nervous about going down to meet with him and procrastinated for weeks before finally meeting him shortly before Thanksgiving break,” she recalled. Rainey Valmon, a superb age-group runner in New York, had abandoned the sport at St. Ann’s School in Brooklyn to pursue a number of activities, including volleyball and basketball.

So at that meeting with Haggerty — who recently retired after more than two decades with the Crimson — when she told him that she had run before high school, he asked, “Do you happen to remember how fast you ran?” She answered, “Oh yeah, I ran 60 flat (in the 400 meters).”

“At that time, I think that 59.3 was our school record,” Haggerty said. “I thought if this girl at 12 years old can run 60 flat, hmm.”

“He agreed to let me come out for the team but warned me that he wouldn’t be able to pay much attention to me at first because I would be way behind the rest of the team,” Rainey Valmon said.

Athletics had played no role in her matriculation at Harvard, but her parents certainly had. Her mother was an educator at a Brooklyn public school and her father was a New York police officer. They had instilled in a young Meredith that college was not an option — she was definitely going.

“I was always encouraged by my parents, my grandparents and people at my school to aim high,” she said. “They always told me that Harvard is something I could shoot for and I had an older sister who had gone to Yale, so I felt that going to an Ivy League school was possible.”

Yet she had no idea how far track and field would take her. It was unthinkable that this walk-on freshman would not only eventually lead the Crimson to its first Heptagonal Championships, but that she would win two NCAA crowns before becoming America’s top-ranked 800-meter runner for the better part of the 1990s, advancing all the way to the Olympic semifinals in the event.

“The night I won the NCAA Outdoor 800 meter title, Frank and I talked about that first meeting,” Rainey Valmon remembered. “He said, ‘When you told me your times, I was skeptical but as soon as I saw you jog I knew you would be great.’ I joked, ‘Likely story, Frank.’ I think it took a bit longer for him to see that I could contribute.”

Contribute wasn’t the appropriate word. She dominated. Rainey Valmon put on a show at her final Heps Championship, scoring 38 points by herself at Franklin Field in 1990. She defeated two teams herself (and nearly a third) as the Crimson claimed its first-ever outdoor League title.

Rainey Valmon’s complete profile can be found at Ivy@50.

Courtesy of the Wall Street Journal

Tucked in a corner of the Athletes’ Village here stands a large sign with an alluring message: “Your impact as an Olympian never ends.”

The office behind that sign is Right to Play, a humanitarian organization that promotes sports as a tool for development in some of the world’s most conflict-ridden and poverty-stricken countries. Right to Play says that about half of the athletes competing in Beijing have visited its office.

But as these politically loaded Games wind down, the Olympic movement finds itself at a crossroads: Can it celebrate athletes who donate time and money, but reject as troublemakers those who open their mouths?

For many elite athletes, social awakening begins at the Games with a visit to the Right to Play booth. American swimmer Natalie Coughlin, for one, calls it a “no brainer” to join.

“You have such an opportunity to raise awareness on a lot of issues,” says Ms. Coughlin. By signing up as an ambassador, her medal haul here netted $80,000 for the organization from Olympic sponsor Johnson & Johnson, which makes donations for every medal won by certain athletes. “There are a lot of people who want to use their Olympic fame for good but don’t know how,” Ms. Coughlin says.

For more about the story, head here.

For more information about the organization, head to Right to Play. A large contingent of Ivy League athletes — both past and present — are involved with the organization.

1920 — Yale’s Eddie Eagan — a future Rhodes Scholar — defeated Sverre Sorsdal of Norway in the final of the light heavyweight boxing final at the Antwerp Games. Twelve years later, Eagan (in the second seat in the photo) became the first person to claim gold at both the Summer and Winter Games when he was a member of the champion four-man bobsled team. No athlete has since matched his feat.

1954 — Anne Warner was born. Not only did she claim a bronze medal on the women’s rowing eight at the Montreal Games in 1976 with Cornell’s Marion Greig, Warner was one of the pioneers in the effort to see Title IX fully applied at Yale. Upon returning from representing their country, she and fellow Olympian Chris Ernst had had enough of the inequality in resources and facilities for the women athletes on campus. With Ernst spearheading the movement, the Yale crew staged a strip-in in the office of an associate athletic director which dramatically changed the course of sport at Yale. That story is told in the film A Hero For Daisy. In 1977, Warner would partner with other Ivy Leaguers to compete in the World Championships. She would team with Penn Law graduate Anita DeFrantz, later a member of the International Olympic Committee, to row in pairs using a new brand of oars developed by Brown graduate Dick Dreissigacker and his brother Peter.

1961 — Tiger Shaw, III, was born. Upon his retirement from alpine skiing, the New York Times wrote: “In his 10 years as the unquestioned leader of the United States Ski Team, Tiger Shaw, a man of such obvious talent and patience that he has been regarded as an extra coach, demonstrated just about everything it takes to be a champion except for the two things no ski champion can do without — reliable knees.” After four serious knee injuries, Shaw returned to Dartmouth for graduate business school. He then co-founded DealerWire, an inventory management system and trading network developed to help car dealers manage their vehicle inventories.

1970 — Sandra Whyte was born. A member of the first team to win a gold medal in women’s ice hockey in Nagano in 1998, Whyte helped usher the sport to new heights. Of the 31 Ivy Leaguers who have competed in Olympic women’s ice hockey, 17 have struck gold with either the U.S. (1998) or Canadian (2002 and 2006) squads. Whyte’s gold-medal-winning teammates in Nagano were Lisa Brown-Miller of Princeton, Katie King and Tara Mounsey of Brown, A.J. Mleczko and Angela Ruggiero of Harvard and Sarah Tueting and Gretchen Ulion of Dartmouth.

Just before the final night of primetime programming gets underway, we thought it would be a perfect time to turn back the clock to the 1972 Munich Games — and in particular, the Men’s marathon.

In that competition was a Yale graduate that would go on to earn a Juris Doctorate from the University of Florida (not the University of Miami as mentioned by the announcer).

His name: Frank Shorter.

Born in Munich, Germany, Shorter would go on to a storied career in athletics and is considered one of the greatest American distance runners ever. But it was the 1972 race where he became a household name, winning the Gold medal in a personal record 2:10.30.

The first video does not have sound but does show more of the 1972 race.

She was a key member of the Ivy League’s first team to receive an automatic berth into the NCAA Women’s Basketball Tournament. Martina Jerant’s Brown Bears threw a huge scare at eventual champion UConn.

In 1994 Brown University, with Martina Jerant, became the Ivy League’s initial entry to the NCAA women’s basketball tournament. As the 16th seed they had to play first seed and eventual champion UConn. Jerant remembers “the Brown Bears in our old uniforms came out and played. The game was tied at halftime.” In the second half Brown led 38-35 before losing 76-60.

“They (the Huskies) were scared” she says. “We eventually lost but it was a great game. They wound up winning the whole thing. I think they beat the next team by 60 points or something.”

Jerant has played a lot of basketball over the years - from grade and high school, all over Europe for many years, and on the Canadian national team - but her team at Brown stands out. “My Brown team really gelled. I’ve played on a lot of teams and that one was really special. My teammates are my closest friends to this day. They are all coming to my wedding this spring.”

At Brown Jerant was Ivy League Rookie of the Year, Ivy League Player of the Year, and three-time All-Ivy. The three-time Brown MVP started the most games in Brown history and is also first in field goal percentage and rebounds. She’s second in games played, blocked shots and free throws, and third in scoring average, points and field goals.

“When I was in Providence all four years it was under construction,” reminisces Jerant, but describes her experience as overwhelmingly positive. “I really can’t remember not being able to do something I wanted,” she says. An assistant coach helped teach her time management skills and “I also used tutors - even in classes where I was doing well, it helped me focus,” she says.

The 6-foot-6 Jerant was born in Canada and grew up in Grosse Pointe, Mich., her parents emigrating from Croatia in 1967. Jerant grew up bilingual. She was a senior in high school and looking for colleges to apply to when “my mom first told me about Brown. We contacted them and the basketball staff began recruiting me.” They visited and she “fell in love with Brown, the campus, the people, the atmosphere. Basketball was a crucial factor because the team and coaching staff introduced me to Brown.”

Jerant’s complete profile can be found at Ivy@50.