2008 Beijing Summer Games
10,942 Athletes, 204 Countries, 302 Events

The Ivy League was represented by 42 athletes at the Games and took home 14 medals — five gold, seven silver and two bronze — spread among 13 athletes. That was the highest number of League individual medalists at a Summer Games since 18 different Ivies stood on the medal platforms of Los Angeles in 1984.

The greatest haul came in rowing where three American women and two Canadian men mined gold in the eight boats. The three women, Caryn Davies (Harvard), Susan Francia (Penn) and Caroline Lind (Princeton) were the first-ever Ivy women rowers to take the top spot. The two men  -- Malcolm Howard (Harvard) and Dominic Seiterle (Dartmouth) -- became the first Ivy Canadian gold medalists in the Summer Games since Princeton's Mike Evans rowed to glory in 1984.

The League also had rowers in the silver- and bronze-winning boats in the men's eight as Great Britain was second with Josh West (Yale) and the U.S. third with Steve Coppola (Princeton). Earlier in the Games, Michelle Guerette (Harvard) took silver in single sculls.

All four Ivy fencers return home with silver. Sada Jacobson (Yale) took individual silver and team bronze in sabre, while James Williams (Columbia) added silver in team sabre and Erinn Smart (Columbia) and Emily Cross (Harvard) did the same in team foil. Williams is the first Ivy male to win an Olympic fencing medal in 60 years and the first to finish as high as second since 1904.

Gymnast Alicia Sacramone (Brown) earlier won team silver for Team USA, becoming the first Ivy Leaguer to win a gymnastics medal as an undergraduate since 1904 when John Grieb of Yale did so.

The League's blog Ivies in Beijing blog drew an impressive 53,581 viewers during its peak days during the Beijing Games.

Launched on July 30, 2008, the blog featured 216 stories, including a daily feature for all 16 days of competition, 40 Ivy@50 Olympic stories, daily recaps of individual and team performances and special video features. The site received an average of 8.3 posts over the 26 days that content was developed, equating to a new post just under every 2.88 hours.

IviesinBeijing.com hit its first documented milestone during the Opening ceremonies, as the total number of page views reached 25,000 just as China’s Yao Ming watched the fireworks overhead to close the immensely entertaining program. The site received its 50,000th page view just prior to the Closing ceremonies.

Much of the success of the site can be attributed to coverage the blog garnered from media giants New York Magazine, Sports Illustrated and Deadspin and sport-specific Web sites Row2k, Track and Field News and TrackShark, amongst others.

The blog featured a unique graphical identity highlighted by a different masthead each day that celebrated the culture and traditions of China. One of the site’s most important features was the breadth of historical information. It displayed — in database form — all of the known Ivy League athletes since the start of the modern Olympic Games in 1896, the total number of medals won at each subsequent Olympic Games and several variables unique to Ivy League athletes, including family ties to the Olympics, Ivy Olympic record books and the rich tradition of Ivy Leaguers that have represented international federations at the Olympic Games.

The Ivies in Beijing blog was developed in June 2008, coupled with research that began in summer 2004, by the collective creative effort of former Ivy Office Assistant Directors Alex Searle and Wes Harris and former Associate Director Brett Hoover.