Princeton At The World University Games

The Opening Ceremonies and first events of the 2028 Summer Olympic Games will begin three years from this week in Los Angeles. 

Did you hear the big news about Los Angeles ’28? No, it's not that the track and field competition will be held the first week of the Games and the swimming competition will be held the second.

The swimming events, by the way, will be held in a pool that will be constructed in SoFi Stadium, the home of the Los Angeles Rams and Los Angeles Chargers. This is similar to the 2024 Olympic Trials, which were held inside Lucas Oil Stadium in Indianapolis.

The biggest story is, of course, the return of lacrosse to the Games as a medal sport. This will be the first time ever for women and the first time for men since 1908.

It won't be the full-field lacrosse that you see in college. This will be the Sixes version, which is pretty much what it sounds like — smaller sides, smaller field, faster pace, higher scoring. 

The final will be July 29, 2028. It will match the United States and Canada (there are few predictions of which TigerBlog is more certain). 

Will there be Princeton representation? TB isn't as sure about that as he is about the teams who will be in the final, but he'll go with "yes" on that one.  

Squash will also be a medal sport in 2028. Princeton alum Olivia Fiechter Weaver (who is married to former Tiger men's lacrosse player Bobby Weaver) is currently the No. 4 ranked player in the world. 

If you have a great memory, you might remember back to Oct. 19, 2012. What were you doing that day? If you were reading TigerBlog, you saw a guest entry from Julie Cerullo, then a senior on the Princeton women's squash team. 

What did she write about? You guessed — that squash should be an Olympic sport. You can read it HERE. This is part of her story:

On paper, squash meets all the criteria required of an Olympic sport in terms of its history, universality and popularity. It’s good for athletes’ health and would be relatively cheap to integrate. But squash will be competing against five other sports for one open berth in the 2020 games. The other aspirant sports are Karate, wushu (a martial art), roller sports, sport climbing and wake boarding, and it won’t get any easier beyond 2020 as lacrosse and mixed martial arts have announced their plans to seek Olympic status in the future. A possible bid by softball and baseball for reinstatement in 2020 further complicates the decision. 

Princeton figures to be well-represented in Los Angeles, as it seems to be in every Summer Olympic Games. If you recall a year ago from Paris, Princeton athletes won three gold medals (Hannah Scott in rowing, Maia Weintraub in fencing, Nice Mead in rowing) and had 16 competitors in all. 

The World University Games aren't quite the Olympics, but they do provide some pretty diverse competition. They have been contested every other year since 1959 (the winter version began in 1960 and continues to the present), or pretty much every other year since 1959. For some reason, they were held in 1967, 1970 and then 1973 but have been back on the every-other-year schedule since, though the 2023 edition was cancelled after the host country, Russia, invaded Ukraine. 

The Games were held in Moscow in the Soviet Union in 1973. Princeton women's athletic pioneer Cathy Corcione won a gold and a silver there. 

The 2029 version will be held in North Carolina, after a stop in South Korea in 2027. The only time to date that the United States has been the host nation for the summer Games was in 1993, when they were held in Buffalo.  

The current World University Games began yesterday with 12 Tigers from five countries and four sports who are currently competing.

You can see the schedule for the Tigers HERE. 

The first Princetonians to kick things off will probably have already done so by the time you read this. They would be Chloe Fox-Gitomer in women's team saber fencing and Jackson Hicke in men's 3x3 basketball.

Hicke is part of an all-Ivy League team, as Hicke will be joined by Avery Brown (Columbia), Chandler Piggé (Harvard) and Nick Townsend (Yale).