An Ivy Olympic Look at August 19
1920 — Cornell’s Frank Foss cleared a world-record 13-5 to garner gold at the Antwerp Games while Dartmouth’s Ed Myers would take bronze in the first pole vault event in Olympic annals. Both men were natives of the Chicago area. Myers was born in Hinsdale, Ill., while Foss would die there.
1934 — Billy Cleary, Jr. was born. The former Harvard All-American was the major force behind the first ‘Miracle on Ice,’ when the United States men’s ice hockey team defeated the heavily favored Soviets for the gold medal in the 1960 Squaw Valley Games. He scored national records of 42 goals and 89 points for the Crimson in 1955 before earning a silver medal in the 1956 Cortina d’Ampezza Olympics. He and his brother Bobby, who was also on the miraculous 1960 team, were also very successful in founding and running a casualty and property company. So successful that they couldn’t make it to the 1960 tryouts. But they were late additions to the team, knocking Herb Brooks from the roster. Billy Cleary would later coach Harvard’s ice hockey team to the 1989 NCAA Championship and serve as the University’s Director of Athletics into the 21st century.
