Just watched on the net the Gold Medal Men's Water Polo game.
Hungary is the Lynah Faithful of Water Polo. Wish I understood the chants - they sounded like good taunts.::rock::
Would that we could have watched all of the Men's Gold Medal Volleyball match, instead of the tape-delayed, chopped-up version that we got.
How much more exciting would that have been live? Thanks to NBC, most of America will never know. God forbid they could have showed a game live that would've finished at, what, 11PM on the west coast. How many kids would've gotten excited about a great sport that deserves much more support than it gets in our national sporting environment.
PS More water polo too, please.
Bucky Gunts - showed up as about the third name on the closing scroll. Played on the 70, 71, and 72 teams. Won the first national championship game in 1971, 3 Ivy League rings. Not bad.
Every Ivy League school had at least one athlete medal in the Beijing games except for one. Guess who? :-/
Cornell did have two alumni competing at the games, both in rowing:
Ken Jurkowski '03 (http://www.nbcolympics.com/athletes/athlete=1288/bio/index.html) who finished 5th in his semifinal heat in the single sculls (and 5th in the "B" Finals)
Jen Kaido '03 (http://www.nbcolympics.com/athletes/athlete=433/bio/index.html) who finished 5th in the quadruple sculls finals.
I did catch the Women's Eight final, which was a great win for the US. Ithaca native (and Harvard grad) Caryn Davies (http://www.nbcolympics.com/athletes/athlete=417/bio/index.html) was a member of that gold medal-winning team. Her brother Kevin was captain of Cornell Men's Crew, and her father is a professor at Cornell.
Alicia Sacramone, a current Brown undergrad, was on the US gymnastics team which won the silver. All other 2008 Ivy medals were earned in either rowing or fencing.
http://iviesinchina.com/beijing-bios/ lists Ivy Olympians by sport and school
http://iviesinchina.com/summer-games/2008-beijing/2008-ivy-olympians/ notes all the medalists in the list.
http://iviesinchina.com/ is a pretty robust site with tons of historical data from all past olympiads and a blog.
Edit: I guess I could've just linked to this: http://www.news.cornell.edu/stories/Aug08/OlympicsAlums.html