The week before she started taking classes at Notre Dame freshman
Mariel Zagunis took gold at the Olympics in Athens.
Zagunis, from Beaverton, Oregon, won the gold medal in the women's
individual sabre competition, becoming the first American woman
ever to win a medal in Olympic fencing. The only fencing gold
ever won by an American man came 100 years ago.
In other events, alumni Shannon Boxx '99 and Kate Sobrero Markgraf
'98 won gold medals as defensive specialists on the U.S. women's
soccer team, and Ruth Riley '01 won a gold medal as a reserve
center on the U.S. women's basketball team.
Zagunis, 19, deferred her enrollment at Notre Dame a year to
concentrate on making the Olympic team and then narrowly missed
the cut by losing a match in late March against another U.S. fencer,
Sada Jacobson, the world's No. 1. The match was decided by narrowest
of margins, a single touch. Jacobson went on to win the bronze
in Athens.
The Notre Dame freshman made the team only because the Nigerian
Olympic committee withdrew its competitor. Normally that slot
would have gone to the next highest-ranked competitor from Africa,
but there wasn't one. That left the door open for the next highest-rated
fencer who had not yet qualified, which was Zagunas, ranked fourth
in the world.
Prior to the games
in Athens, only two Olympic gold medalists had to ties to Notre
Dame: basketball players Vince Boryla (1964, Tokyo) and Adrian
Dantley '78 (1976, Montreal) with Boryla having transferred to
the University of Denver prior to his Olympic participation.
Here's how other
Notre Dame student athletes and alumni did at the Olympics:
-- Monica Gonzalez
'02 competed on Mexico's soccer team, which lost to Brazil in
the quarter-finals.
-- Junior Christel Bouvron became the first current Notre Dame
student to compete in the Olympics in 84 years when she swam the
200m butterfly for Singapore. She finished 32nd, last, matching
her seeding coming into the games. She had the same result at
the 2000 Olympics in Sydney.
-- Jan Viviani '03,
four-time All-American in fencing for the Irish, competed for
the U.S. in the men's epee team competition.
The U.S. team
finished sixth.
-- Freshman Andrew MacKay swam the 200m individual medley for
the Cayman Islands and finished 41st in the 50-swimmer field.
On the plus side, that was six places higher than his seeding,
and he registered the fastest start off the blocks of any swimmer
at the games. He also swam the 400m individual medley, finishing
33rd out of 36, one better than his seeding.
-- Jeff Smoke '03 competed in flatwater kayaking for the United
States. His team finished seventh in the semifinals of the two-man
1000m race.
(October 2004)
