How's this for a local Olympic connection? Over the weekend, we had all three kids in town and we were enjoying a great dinner Sunday night when son #1 piped up with the announcement that a friend of his from Penn was on the Women's Olympic 8 crew team. "I almost forgot abut it," he said. "But I think her race is on television."
No sooner had we finished the dishes, than what should come on NBC but the Women's 8 race from Beijing and there was "Susan" (Francia), in the third seat. At least that's what our son told us. You know we were cheering her home and imagine our great surprise when they won!!
Son #1 quickly checked her Facebook page (they are apparently Facebook "friends") and it confirmed what we had just seen. "Susan is an Olympic champion" it read under a photo of her wearing the gold Medal.
The rest of the story was available in our local paper this morning. A graduate of Abington High School (also in our neck of the woods), Susan Francia graduated from Penn four years ago and has been training ever since at the Princeton Olympic Training Center in Princeton, New Jersey. She is one year ahead of son #1 but apparently they had quite a few classes in common. Enough for her to mention to him that she was indeed going to train for the Olympics once she graduated.
Pretty amazing. And it puts those four years into perspective. During that same time period, son #1 earned two Masters degrees (one from an American university one from a European one). The gold medal and the two sheepskins will probably ultimately "pay" similar dividends but I don't think she will have as hard a time finding a job as my son did.
Talk about the power of sports....
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