Olympics

[TimV]

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::

[Scersk '97]

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.

[TimV]

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.

[RichH]

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 who finished 5th in his semifinal heat in the single sculls (and 5th in the "B" Finals)
Jen Kaido '03 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  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