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Harvard's Athletic Excellence The Harvard-Yale crew race held on Aug. 3, 1852, on Lake Winnepesaukee in New Hampshire was the first college sporting event in America. Harvard won the competition, besting the Yalies by two lengths. Ever since, Harvard athletes have distinguished themselves in international, national, and conference contests. A Harvard athlete won the first first-place medal of the modern Olympic Games. The Class of 1898's James B. Connolly of South Boston was victorious in the hop, skip, and jump (now known as the triple jump), the first event of the 1896 Games in Athens. Overall, Harvard won five top medals at the 1896 Olympics. One hundred years later, at the 1996 Games in Atlanta, Harvard Athletic Director Bill Cleary '56 (a hockey star and two-time Olympic medal winner) was recognized as one of America's 100 greatest living gold medal winners along with athletes such as Mark Spitz and Bruce Jenner - and two other Harvard athletes/gold medal winners, Tenley Albright Blakeley '53-55, and Dick Button '52. Harvard has had an athlete compete at every modern summer Olympic Games, and has been represented at every Olympic Winter Games, except 1964 and 1972. David Berkoff '88, the world record holder for the 100 meter backstroke, was a silver medalist in the 1988 Seoul Olympics. Figure skater Paul Wylie '91 garnered a silver medal in Albertville in 1992. With her silver medal in lightweight double sculls in Atlanta in 1996, rower Lindsay Burns '87 raised Harvard's all-time medal count to 75: 32 gold, 27 silver, and 16 bronze. In 1998, Sandra Whyte '92 and A.J. Mleczko '97-99 played on the women's hockey team in Nagano. Besides the Olympics, high points in recent years have included the men's ice hockey squad, which won the NCAA Championship in 1988-89 and more recently ('99-00) were Ivy League champs, and the women's lacrosse team, which captured the NCAA title in 1990. The women's squash team in 1996 won its fifth straight national championship, while the men's squash squad took home its sixth consecutive national title. The fencing team has produced World Cup contenders and a 1994 NCAA champion, Kwame van Leeuwen. And in 1998 the softball team won its first-ever Ivy League title. Women's hockey made the 1998-99 season unforgettable. The Crimson became national champs in the most successful season in the history of women's college hockey. In its run to the title, the Crimson scored an unprecedented 33-1 record, notched its first Ivy League crown in 10 years, and its first-ever ECAC Regular Season and Tournament Championship. Also in '99, the baseball team captured its third consecutive Ivy League title. In the 1999-2000 season, men's tennis came out on top of the ECAC, while men's swimming and diving won both the Ivy League and the EISL championships.
Today Harvard has the largest intercollegiate athletic program in the country, with 41 varsity sports (21 men's, and 20 women's). More than 1,300 varsity letters or freshman numerals are issued annually. Those who don't join varsity or junior varsity teams can participate in an extensive intramurals program – more than 3,000 students engage in some thousand contests every year. There are also more than two dozen club sports, from aikido to croquet to ultimate Frisbee. Harvard is a member of the Ivy League, along with Brown, Columbia, Cornell, Dartmouth, Pennsylvania, Princeton, and Yale. Under the League's founding document, the Presidents' Agreement of 1954, there are no athletic scholarships. Financial aid to students, whether or not they are athletes, is based solely on need. Harvard's athletic programs are financed not by gate receipts, but through the overall budget of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences. More information about intercollegiate athletics at Harvard is available online at http://fas-www.harvard.edu/~athletic. The Crimson Sportsline at (617) 496-1383 can be accessed 24 hours a day, seven days a week.
Copyright 2007 President and Fellows of Harvard College
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