Everyone on this US Olympic team went to Harvard

livemint.com:

PARIS—Harvard is known for producing American presidents, Nobel Prize winners and people who love to remind you that they went to Harvard. It’s not known for churning out the world’s greatest athletes. In fact, Harvard is about as much of a factory for American sports talent as the Sorbonne.

So how is there an entire U.S. team at the Olympics that consists exclusively of guys from Harvard? When the American men’s saber team takes the piste on Wednesday, the four-man roster will have three Harvard alumni and one incoming Harvard freshman, and the Crimson in red, white and blue are favored to bring home a medal. But the first all-Harvard team at the Olympics accounts for only half of the school’s fencers in Paris.

There are six representing the U.S. and two more for Canada in the Grand Palais, the ornate exhibition hall that has been transformed into the world’s most spectacular fencing venue. This week, it has also become a Harvard satellite campus.

It’s not just that Harvard has more fencers at the Olympics than other colleges. Harvard has more fencers at the Olympics than most countries. There are 53 nations with fencers here—and the delegation from Cambridge, Mass.

is bigger than 42 of them. There are so many Harvard fencers running around here with swords that there has already been Crimson-on-Crimson bloodshed. In a matchup of a Harvard senior and sophomore, American foilist Lauren Scruggs beat Canada’s Jessica Guo on her way to an improbable silver medal.

To understand why there are so many Olympic fencers coming from Harvard, it’s important to remember that fencing is basically chess with swords. A sport that demands stabbing and strategizing rewards cerebral athletes, so it’s not surprising that the U.S. team has