Six athletes with Dartmouth connections—five alums and one current student—are headed to Paris this month to compete in the 2024 Summer Olympics.

The Big Green Olympians are vying for medals in men’s and women’s rowing, men’s and women’s rugby sevens, and women’s basketball. Two Dartmouth coaches are also participating.

The Paris Olympics begin with an opening ceremony on July 26, and run to Sunday, Aug. 9. The Summer Games will be broadcast live on Peacock and the NBC networks. 

Dartmouth, long known as a leader in winter sports, has dominated the collegiate medal count at the Winter Games since 1924 in skiing, hockey, and biathlon with 15 gold, nine silver, and five bronze medals.

But Big Green athletes have also participated in Summer Olympics going back to the London Games in 1908, competing primarily in track and field in the earlier era with a growing presence in rowing starting in the 1970s and in soccer, equestrian, and rugby after 2000. Dartmouth Summer Olympic athletes brought home six gold, nine silver, and five bronze medals, more than half of which were won in track and field competitions in the first half of the 20th Century.

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Here’s the rundown of the Olympians headed to Paris with Big Green ties:

William Bender ’24 

The current engineering major qualified for the USA men’s heavyweight rowing team along with Oliver Bub ’20 in the men’s pair U.S. Olympic finals in April. This will be the Vermont native and Hanover High alum’s first trip to the Olympics, where Bender will compete in the men’s pair with former Dartmouth rowing teammate Bub once again. Bender, who is also an avid Alpine and Nordic skier, along with Bub finished first in the April Olympic trials in Florida last April, and finished third in the varsity eight at the International Rowing Association nationals rowing for Dartmouth in 2021. Bender took a year off to train and expects to graduate in the spring of 2025.

Oliver Bub ’20 

The Connecticut native grew up in a family of rowers and started in the sport as a freshman in high school. Both of Bub’s parents rowed for Boston University and continued in competitive rowing, and Olympians were frequent visitors in his house. Bub met his Olympic teammate Bender on the Dartmouth heavyweight rowing team but was later matched up with him by the luck of the draw in the Winter Speed Order in Sarasota, Fla., in 2023, where they took third in the pair event to earn automatic invitations to the first U.S. Rowing men’s senior selection camp later that year. This will be the first Olympic Games for Bub, whose top honors include a first-place finish in the four event in the 2021 US Rowing Summer National Championships, and third in the pair event in the 2023 US Rowing National Selection Regatta.

Madison Hughes ’15

This will be the third trip to the Olympics for the internationally ranked men’s rugby sevens player and former Dartmouth club rugby captain. Hughes captained the professional rugby union team US Eagles to their highest ever finish in the sevens series at sixth place in the 2014-15 season and contributed to a Team USA sixth-place finish in the 2020 Tokyo Games, and ninth-place finish in the 2016 Olympics in Rio de Janeiro. Hughes grew up in Epsom, England, but has followed American sports from childhood, counting himself as a die-hard fan of the New England Patriots and the Boston Red Sox. The Dartmouth history major was inducted into Dartmouth’s Wearers of the Green for his contributions to club rugby and was a member of the Sphinx Society as an undergraduate.

Ariana Ramsey ’22

The former Dartmouth women’s rugby co-captain, a three-time National Intercollegiate Rugby Association divisional champion, heads to Paris for her second Olympic Games. The first Dartmouth women’s rugby player to make it to the Olympics, Ramsey scored a try in the United States’ 17-7 win over Japan that helped propel the team to a sixth-place finish at the 2020 Tokyo Olympics. As a collegiate star, the Philadelphia native led the Big Green with 11 tries in just five matches, including two in the championship victory over Harvard, to lead Dartmouth to its second of back-to-back NIRA titles in 2022, earning herself the MVP title. An economics major at Dartmouth, Ramsey speaks French and Mandarin Chinese and is a certified personal trainer.

Molly Reckford ’15 

This will be Reckford’s second trip to the Olympics to compete in lightweight women’s double sculls where she will be paired again with fellow rower Michelle Sechser. The duo took 5th in the event in the 2020 Tokyo Games. Reckford told Dartmouth Athletics that she and her partner are hungry to medal in Paris, particularly since double sculls will be dropped as an official event after the 2024 Games. Reckford walked onto Dartmouth’s open-weight rowing team in her first year and finished her senior year with a win in the Eastern Sprints Regatta Petite Final and placed second in the Petite Final at the Ivy League Championship. She graduated with a double major in government and psychology; Reckford was a Collegiate Rowing Coaches Association scholar athlete and a War and Peace Fellow at the John Sloan Dickey Center for International Understanding. Reckford is also an adviser for the Elite Athlete Management Program at Broadridge Financial Solutions in Boston.

Isalys Quiñones ’19, Thayer ’20

Quiñones, known as “Ice” to her teammates, led Dartmouth women’s basketball in her senior year, averaging 14 points a game and winning the Gail Koziara ’82 Most Valuable Player Award for the season. The California native earned her BA and BE in engineering sciences and was part of the first-ever Puerto Rican women’s Olympic basketball team at the 2020 Tokyo Games, where the team finished at number 12. The starting center for the Puerto Rican women’s team at the 2024 Games, Quiñones is also continuing her work as an environmental engineer at QNOPY Inc. based in her home state of California. She is reportedly pursuing an offer to play professional basketball in France after the Olympics and plans to keep her engineering job, as well.

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In addition to the Dartmouth athletes, two Dartmouth coaches are participating in the Games.

Wyatt Allen

The Dartmouth men’s heavyweight rowing coach joins the Team USA coaching staff and will work directly with Bub and Bender in Paris. Allen won gold as a member of the world record team USA eights at the 2004 Olympics in Athens, and rowed on the bronze-medal winning USA eight team in the 2008 Olympics in Beijing.

Casey Ratzlaff

The volunteer assistant coach for men’s tennis will be competing in wheelchair tennis at the 2024 Paris Paralympics. Ratzlaff is the number 1 men’s open wheelchair tennis player in the United States and #14 in the world. His Paralympic debut was in the 2020 Tokyo Games with Team USA, and he has been the highest-ranked male in U.S. wheelchair tennis since 2018.