These Are the Local Athletes Who Medaled at the Olympics
August 10, 2021Sports
Gold, silver, and bronze medals; Photo by Getty Images

These Are the Local Athletes Who Medaled at the Olympics

Athletes with Milwaukee-area ties had some memorable performances at the Tokyo Summer Olympics.

BY Rich Rovito

Molly Seidel

2020 Olympic Trials Marathon; Photo courtesy of Molly Seidel

Molly Seidel, a Nashotah native, turned in one of the more memorable performances of the Tokyo Games with her gutsy race to capture a bronze medal in the marathon. Running just her third race ever at the 26.2-mile distance, Seidel ran in the lead pack throughout the run in brutal conditions, with high heat and stifling humidity wreaking havoc on the field of runners. 

Concerns about weather conditions led organizers to hold the marathon in Sapporo, the capital of the northern Japanese island of Hokkaido about 500 miles north of Tokyo. But conditions in Sapporo plagued the runners throughout the duration of the event.

Late in the race, Seidel, 27, was part of a small group that split from the pack. In the grueling marathon’s final stages, Seidel found herself with only a pair of runners ahead of her, Kenyans Peres Jepchirchir and Brigid Kosgei, two of the world’s elite distance runners, in what many have called the strongest field ever for the women’s Olympic marathon.

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Seidel pointed to the USA logo on her racing top and then raised her finger in the air as she approached the finish line. After a few more strides, Seidel repeatedly screamed “yes!” as she crossed the line with a time of 2:27:46 to become only the third U.S. woman to win an Olympic marathon medal.

Seidel joined Joan Benoit Samuelson, who won the inaugural race at the 1984 Los Angeles Games, and Deena Kastor, who captured bronze at the 2004 Athens Games, as the only American women.

 

 

Seidel, who had stellar prep running career at tiny University Lake School in Waukesha County and then in college at Notre Dame, became a sensation in the running world when she finished second in the Olympic Trials marathon in Atlanta in February 2020 in her first-ever race at that distance. The performance earned her one of the three spots on the U.S. women’s Olympic marathon team. She then had to wait a year to compete in the Olympics, which were delayed by the coronavirus pandemic. 

After her stunning run through the streets of Sapporo, Seidel traveled south to Tokyo, where she was awarded her bronze medal during the closing ceremonies at Olympic Stadium. 

Maddy Bernau

Waterford’s 23-year-old Maddy Bernau turned in a magical moment of her own when she and teammate Brian Burrows, 33, of Fallbrook, California, captured the bronze medal in the first-ever Olympic trap mixed-team competition.

They defeated Slovakia’s Zuzana Rehak Stefecekova and Erik Varga in the bronze-medal match. The American pair won a shoot-off after the match ended in a 42-all tie. Both teams hit their first two targets in the shoot-off, but Slovakia missed its third.

That put the pressure on Bernau, who stepped up with a coveted Olympic medal at stake and squeezed off the winning shot.

Burrows hit 23 targets and Bernau 19 to tie Slovakia and force the thrilling shoot-off at the Asaka Shooting Range in Tokyo. Burrows and Bernau were making their Olympic debuts. 

The Tokyo Games featured the inaugural Olympic competition in mixed trapshooting, which features a male and female competing on the same team. Each participant shoots 75 targets in qualification rounds.

Bernau also competed in the women’s trap shooting event at the Tokyo Games. She finished in seventh place after five qualifying rounds, narrowly missing the medal round. She secured one of the two spots on the U.S. Olympic women’s trapshooting team in March 2020.

Bernau left the Tokyo Games with two personal bests, a 119 in women’s trap qualification and 75 straight in mixed team qualification.

The USA Shooting team earned a total of six medals at the Summer Games, its best performance since the 1964 Tokyo Olympics.

“I’m proud of the contributions made by every member of this team. In a period when training and competitions have been disrupted by the COVID-19 pandemic, our shooters came prepared to compete and win,” USA Shooting CEO Matt Suggs said. “It’s been an incredibly difficult year for our coaches and athletes to prepare for these games.”

A crowd of Bernau’s family, friends and supporters gathered at Milwaukee Mitchell International Airport last week as she made her triumphant return from Tokyo, her bronze medal draped around her neck. 

Khris Middleton & Jrue Holiday

Fresh off an NBA championship, Milwaukee Bucks stars Khris Middleton and Jrue Holiday were part of the gold medal-winning basketball squad, which closed out its run in Tokyo with an 87-82 win over France over the weekend, avenging an earlier loss to the French squad in group play.

Holiday started all of Team USA’s games during the magical run and was a key contributor. Middleton’s playing time was a bit sporadic, but he chipped in off the bench. Holiday had 11 points, five rebounds and three steals in 30 minutes of action in the gold-medal game. Middleton tallied four points in 11 minutes.

After an exhausting run to an NBA crown, the Bucks’ first in 50 years, Holiday and Middleton took part in a championship parade and celebration before immediately embarking on the 6,200-mile trek to Tokyo to join the hoops squad. After a slow start, the men’s basketball team began to jell and advanced to the “knockout round,” where they defeated Spain and Australia to set up the gold-medal match versus France.

Another player from the Bucks title-winning team, rookie Jordan Nwora, was a key member of Nigeria’s Men’s National Basketball Team. Nwora poured in a game-high 33 points in a preliminary round loss to Germany.

Non-Medalists

Other area Olympians competed in the Tokyo Games and, although they didn’t bring home medals got to compete on the world stage after earning spots to represent the United States in their respective sports.

Track athlete Emily Sisson, who was born in Menomonee Falls, competed in the 10,000 meters over the weekend in Tokyo and finished a very respectable 10th in a race held in oppressive heat and humidity. 

Sisson’s time of 31:08.58 was best among the three Americans competing in the event. Alicia Monson of Amery and a former University of Wisconsin-Madison track athlete came in 13th at 31:21.36.

Sisson, 29, who now resides in Phoenix, earned a spot on the Olympic Track and Field team when she obliterated the field in the 10,000 meters in the Olympic Trials earlier this year. Sisson won in a Trials record time of 31:03.82, shattering a standard that had stood for 17 years.

Photo courtesy of Stephanie Roble

On the water in Japan, sailor Stephanie Roble, 32, of East Troy, and her sailing partner, Chicago native Maggie Shea, competed in the 49erFX competition. Roble and Shea competed on a high-performance skiff, the fastest boat that women sail in Olympic competition.

Roble and Shea appeared to be poised to take part the medal race, but their Olympics ended with a heartbreaking disqualification, their first ever, in one of the final qualifying races.

The disqualification occurred as Roble and Shea competed in the final three races of the 12-race qualifying series. Roble and Shea were in sixth overall at that time but the disqualification in one of the races on the choppy waters of Enoshima Yacht Harbor sunk their overall point total to a level that had them just missing the total needed to advance to the medal race.

Roble, whose passion for sailing started at an early age on the waters of tiny Lake Beulah in Walworth County, had to wait a year after qualifying to compete in the Olympics due to the coronavirus pandemic. 

West Bend rower Alie Rusher, 25, competed in the quadruple sculls competition in the Tokyo Games, with her team finishing fifth in their preliminary heat. The team went on to finish sixth in the repechage race – a contest in which those who failed to win heats compete for a place in the final – at Sea Forest Waterway in Tokyo Bay.

Rusher’s father, John, was part of the men’s four crew that won a bronze medal at the 1988 Summer Games in Seoul. Her mother, Cynthia Eckert, won a silver medal on the women’s four at the 1992 Games in Barcelona.

Rich Rovito
Rich Rovito is a freelance writer for Milwaukee Magazine.

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