The Paris Olympic Games came to a close on Sunday, and Team USA topped the overall standings with a total of 126 medals: 40 gold, 44 silver and 42 bronze.
Athletes from Pennsylvania, New Jersey, and Delaware contributed a lot to that total. So, before we completely forget about sports like handball, rhythmic gymnastics, and dressage until the 2028 Games in Los Angeles, let’s recap which athletes from the area — or with ties to it — came back with some hardware.
Archery
Recurve bow archer Casey Kaufhold, from Lancaster, Pa., won bronze in the mixed team competition, with her teammate, Brady Ellison.
Artistic Swimming
Megumi Field won silver in the women’s team event, and also finished 10th in the duet competition with teammate and fellow silver medalist Jaime Czarkowski.
Next up for the 18-year-old? Stanford University and its artistic swimming program, which has won nine Collegiate National Championships, most recently in 2021.
Basketball
Sixers star Joel Embiid and Miami Heat center Bam Adebayo, from Newark, N.J., took gold as part of the star-studded men’s team that beat hosts France, 98-87, in the final. It was the men’s team’s fifth consecutive gold medal.
Embiid, who chose to represent the U.S. over Cameroon and France, was showered with boos from the French crowd throughout the tournament — and loved it.
The similarly star-studded U.S. women’s team also claimed gold, in a suspenseful 67-66 win over, again, France.
North Philly native and Rutgers alum Kahleah Copper scored 12 points in the final, including the clinching point. Connecticut Sun forward and Harrisburg native Alyssa Thomas was also on the team, which Gloucester County, N.J., native and former La Salle player and assistant coach Cheryl Reeve served as head coach.
Fencing
Philly-native Maia Weintraub won gold with the women’s foil team, along with Jacqueline Dubrovich, from Riverdale, N.J.
Golf
Scottie Scheffler — from way up in Ridgewood, N.J., won the men’s individual competition, with a 9-under-par 62 in the final round. The world’s No. 1-ranked golfer adds his gold medal to a trophy cabinet that already includes two Masters Green Jackets and two Players Championships.
Gymnastics
Hezly Rivera won gold as part of the women’s artistic gymnastics team.
At 16 years old, Rivera was the youngest athlete on the entire U.S. team this summer. The youngest men’s athlete on Team USA, 16-year-old runner Quincy Wilson, won gold with the 4×400 relay team, so watch out for those two in L.A. in 2028.
Penn State grad Stephen Nedoroscik secured the U.S. team’s bronze medal win in the team competition with a strong, end-of-competition performance in his specialty, the pommel horse, and then earned an individual bronze for himself days later.
With Nedoroscik’s resemblance to “American Dad’s” Steve Smith, as well as his expertise with Rubik’s Cubes and the video game “Rocket League,” this probably isn’t the last the internet has seen of “Pommel Horse Guy.”
Rowing
The men’s coxless four crew that won a gold medal included Justin Best (from Kennett Square, Pa.; attended Drexel University), Michael Grady (from Pittsburgh) and Nick Mead (from Strafford, Pa.; attended Princeton University).
Best revealed that the team watched Jason Kelce’s 2018 Super Bowl LVII parade speech to get pumped up for the race.
The U.S.’s last gold in this event had come during the Eisenhower administration.
Rugby
Philly native Ariana Ramsey and Kris Thomas (an alternate) won bronze for the women’s sevens team. Ramsey played the crucial pass for Alex Sedrick’s last-second, full-field sprint to snatch the win from Australia.
Soccer
The U.S. women’s national team won its fifth gold medal — the first since 2012 — with a 1-0 win over Brazil in the final.
North Carolina Courage goalkeeper Casey Murphy, who’s from Bridgewater Township, N.J., and played her college soccer at Rutgers University, was on the squad behind starting goalie Alyssa Naeher, who went to Penn State. Midfielder Sam Coffey was also a Nittany Lion.
Swimming
Nic Fink, from Morristown, N.J., came back from Paris with three medals: gold in the 4x100m mixed medley relay and silver in the men’s 100-meter individual breaststroke and the 4×100 men’s medley relay. The oldest member on the swim team and the oldest first-time U.S. Olympic swimming medalist in 120 years, the 31-year-old returns to parades, plaudits, and his 9-to-5 at an engineering firm.
Chris Guiliano, from Douglassville, Pa., won gold in the men’s 4×100 freestyle relay and silver in the 4×200 freestyle relay. Jack Alexy also won gold in the 4×100 freestyle relay.
Track and field
Penn State grad Joe Kovacs, from Bethlehem, Pa., won his third straight Olympic silver medal in the men’s shot put.
Sydney McLaughlin-Levrone, from Dunellen, N.J., broke her own world record to comfortably clinch her second successive Olympic gold medal in the women’s 400-meter hurdles.
She also won a successive gold in the women’s 4x400m hurdles, setting a new U.S. record.
Triathlon
Morgan Pearson braved the questionably clean Seine River and won a second successive Olympic silver medal in the mixed relay team.
Volleyball
The men’s (not beach) volleyball team won its second successive bronze medal, the third in the team’s history. Rio bronze medalists and former Penn Staters Matt Anderson, Max Holt, and Aaron Russell were on the team.
On the women’s team, Tokyo gold medalist and fellow Nittany Lion Haleigh Washington won a silver medal after the team lost in straight sets to Italy in the final.
Wrestling
Spencer Lee, who was originally born in Denver but moved to Saegertown, Pa., then Murrysville, Pa., won silver in the men’s freestyle 57kg.
Kyle Dake, a member of State College’s Nittany Lion Wrestling Club, took bronze in men’s freestyle 74kg — his second-successive Olympic bronze medal.
Aaron Brooks, who attended Penn State and is now a club teammate of Dake, earned bronze in the Men’s Freestyle 86kg.
There’s still the Paralympics
The Summer of sport isn’t over, as the 22 events of the Paralympic Games run from Aug. 28 to Sept. 8.
You can check through the full schedule of events and results here, and you can watch it all on NBC’s slate of T.V. channels and streaming on Peacock.
Here’s who’s competing from our area.
- Para-swimmer David Abrahams, who won a silver medal in the Tokyo Paralympics, is from Havertown, Pa.
- Paracyclist Brandon Lyons (from Mechanicsburg, Pa., and attended Penn State)
- Paratriathlete Eric McElvenny is from Pittsburgh.
- Paracyclist Shawn Morelli is from Meadville, Pa.
- Para-archer Kevin Polish comes from Carmichaels, Pa., and will be competing in his third Games. He competes in the compound bow events.
- Paratriathlete Emelia Perry was born in Philly, but moved with her family to Osaka, Japan as a baby. She returned to the U.S. in 2011 for college, and graduated from Ursinus College in Collegeville, Pa., in 2015. She sustained a spinal cord injury in 2017, and started competing in wheelchair racing and triathlon in 2022. In wheelchair racing, she came in first — overall — at the 2022 Broad Street Run. She also was the Paratriathlon National Champion that year.
- Mason Symons, from Hershey, Pa., is competing on the wheelchair rugby team. The Aug. 29 to Sept. 02 schedule is here.
- Paracyclist Cody Wills is from Harrisburg, Pa.
- Taylor Winnet, the most decorated athlete in the Parapan American Games Santiago last year with three gold medals and four silvers, is from Hershey, Pa.
- Christie Raleigh Crossley is from Toms River, N.J., and won gold in last year’s World Championships.
- Paralympic athlete Gemma Wollenschlaeger in mixed PR3 coxed four attends Temple University.
