Olympics: what courses and universities are there for athletes in Tokyo?

by Marianne Roxello from Estudar Fora

Achieving an Olympic level in any sport requires a lifetime of preparation. In most cases, it takes years and years of training to be one of the best in the world. some athletes who are in Tokyo 2020 Olympics (held in 2021), in addition to reaching this level in sports, they were also able to study at universities such as Oxford, MIT and Harvard.

In many countries, college sports are a stepping stone for athletes who wish to enter higher education. In areas where there are groups such as the Ivy League (see Ivy League and Tokyo Roku Daigaku, Japanese Ivy League), universities select students who already excel in a sport to receive scholarships and defend the institution. competing in university leagues.

The same is the case with Stanford. Only in the last Olympics, 2016 in Rio, only the students and alumni of the institute won a total of 27 medals. It is possible to see the importance of this policy of attracting students to integrate university teams into the diversity of nationalities of athletes. For example, in the case of Stanford, university graduates are representing 13 countries in Tokyo.

Below, see how many and which Tokyo Olympic competitors study or graduate from the world’s top 5 universities. We use the QS Ranking 2022 ranking of top universities.

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Out of the top 5 universities, MIT is the one that sent the least number of students to this year’s Olympics. skater alexis sablon University representative. He graduated from the Master of Architecture program in 2016 with the thesis “Nuclear Oasis: The Story of 10,000-Year Trash”.

Anyone watching the skateboarding final with our Brazilian silver medalist Resa Leal will remember Alexis competing. While attending the event at MIT in 2015, Alexis won the Skateboarding World Championship for Street Woman.