MySportsResults.com – News – Connecticut at the Summer Olympics – Part 3

By Senior Correspondent Marty Ogden, Editing and Graphics by Ron Knapp

Connecticut Colleges at the Olympics

There have been several Olympic athletes that have come from out of state and competed for Connecticut colleges during those formative years. The headliner of this group must be Frank Shorter who grew up in Middletown, NY before attending Yale University from 1965- 1969. He won the NCAA six mile run title during his senior year before he moved to Florida to train with the Florida Track Club. Shorter achieved his greatest recognition in the marathon, and he is the only American athlete to win two medals in the Olympic marathon. At the Munich Games in 1972, he set off the American Running Boom by winning the gold medal in front of a worldwide television audience. Four years later Shorter took silver in the marathon behind an East German athlete who was later implicated as a part of the state-sponsored doping program by his government.

One of Bill Rogers’ teammates at Wesleyan was Jeff Galloway who joined Shorter and Jack Bachelor and trained with the Florida Track Club. He grew up in Atlanta, Georgia and became a Division III All American as a Cardinal. Training with such noted company, Galloway qualified for the 10,000m in the 1972 Olympics in Munich and finished 11th in the preliminaries. According to noted runner and journalist, Joe Henderson, Galloway “should have been an Olympic marathoner” but is sometimes said to have given up his shot at a spot in the longer event to help his friend, Bacheler, to make the 1972 team. Galloway is quoted as saying, “my greatest thrill was pacing Jack through the marathon trial and then dropping back at the finish so that he could take the remaining spot on the marathon team.” Bacheler had narrowly missed out qualifying in the 10,000m trials a week earlier. Galloway set an American ten-mile road race record in 1973, posting a time of 47:49 and even wrote Galloway’s Book on Running which showed amateur runners how to complete a marathon using a run-walk method.

Yale at the Olympics

The early years of the Olympics the Ivy League made up a large number of the American delegation. Through the years, the Bulldogs have sent at least three dozen of their athletes to the Games in a variety of track and field events. Besides Shorter and Karl Warner (‘32 Olympics – see Part 1 of series), here is a brief list of a few of the most notable Yalies who competed for the United States in the Olympic Games.

Richard Sheldon,…