Olympic Games: What courses and universities do athletes offer in Tokyo?

Skate and MIT: In addition to being a skate athlete, Alexis Sablone holds a master’s degree in architecture (Ezra Shaw/Team/Getty Images)

Written by Marianne Roccello, from Estodar Fora

Achieving Olympic standard in any sport requires lifelong preparation. In most cases, it takes years and years of training to be among the best in the world. Some of the athletes in Tokyo Olympics 2020 (held in 2021), in addition to reaching this level in sports, they were also able to study in universities such as Oxford, MIT and Harvard University.

In many countries, college sports are a stepping stone for athletes eager to enter higher education. In areas with groups such as the Ivy League (see Ivy League, Tokyo roku daigaku, and Japanese Ivy League), universities select students who already excel in a sport to receive scholarships and compete in university tournaments that champion the institution.

This is the case with Stanford. Only at the last Olympic Games, in Rio in 2016, only students and graduates of the institution won a total of 27 medals. The importance of this policy can be seen in attracting students to integrate the university’s teams into the diversity of nationalities of the athletes. In the case of Stanford, for example, college graduates represent the 13 countries in Tokyo.

Below, see how many competitors are in the Tokyo Olympics and which ones are studying or graduating from the top 5 universities in the world. We use the QS Ranking 2022 for the best universities.

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Among the top 5 universities, MIT is the one that has sent the fewest students to this year’s Olympics. skater Alexis Sablon He is the representative of the university. I graduated from the MA in Architecture in 2016 with the thesis “Nuclear Oasis: A 10,000-Year-Old Garbage Story”.

Anyone who watched the skateboarding final with Brazilian silver medalist Risa Lille will remember Alexis’ competition. While attending the program at MIT in 2015, Alexis won the Women’s Street Skateboarding World Championships.