Promotional brochure advocating for establishing an Olympic Training Site at Northern Michigan University.

After a rocky road, Tokyo is now hosting the 2020/21 Olympic Games. Marquette may be a world away, but the Northern Michigan University Olympic Training Site has ties to four competing athletes and a coach in Tokyo. The ties between Marquette and the Olympics goes back decades.

The concept of an Olympic Training Center at NMU was first discussed in 1965. The local lobbying campaign for the center picked up steam in the late 1970s, including getting an endorsement from President Gerald R. Ford in 1978. Ford described Northern’s proposal for a year-round training facility as “most appealing,” saying the Marquette region and facilities “constitute a prime location.”

Even with Ford’s support, NMU wasn’t designated a U.S. Olympic Training Center until 1985. It was the third OTC, joining Colorado Springs, CO and Lake Placid, NY. In 1989, the name changed to the U.S. Olympic Education Center to recognize that Marquette was the only training site where athletes could both train for international competition and pursue an education at the same time.

Over the years, the USOEC produced 30 Olympic medalists (who have won 36 medals), more than 66 athletes with ties to the program have competed in the Olympic Games and 139 athletes have earned their high school diplomas and college degrees. Overall, the program has hosted some 25,000 athletes from more than 40 different countries on either a long-term or short-term basis. The athletes have trained or competed in 29 different sports, with long-term resident-athlete programs for short track speed skating, boxing, women’s freestyle wrestling, weightlifting and Greco-Roman wrestling.

The program hosted a number of national and international events, including the 2003 and 2009 ISU Short Track Speed Skating World Cups and the 2006 U.S. Short Track Speed Skating Championships which also served as the U.S. Olympic Trials. They also hosted the 2010 USA Weightlifting National Collegiate Championships and numerous Junior Olympic Boxing Championships.

In 2011, the U.S. Olympic Committee changed the way it funds training centers, which resulted in the loss of the Olympic speed-skating and boxing programs at NMU. As the USOC reorganized into separate Olympic training sites for individual sports, rather than all-encompassing training centers, in 2014 the program name changed from the U.S. Olympic Education Center to the Northern Michigan University Olympic Training Site. As one of 15 U.S. Olympic training sites across the country, NMU currently hosts men’s Greco-Roman wrestling and men’s and women’s weightlifting.

Currently, athletes must be approved by the coaching staff, their national governing body and NMU to be admitted into the program. Athletes attend NMU while training in their respective sports. The student athletes receive free or reduced room and board, access to training facilities as well as sports medicine and sports science services, academic tutoring, and a waiver of out-of-state tuition fees by NMU. Athletes are responsible for tuition at the in-state rate, travel and other training expenses.

The current Olympians with ties to the NMU-OTS are Helen Maroulis, Adeline Gray, Sarah Robles, SPC Alejandro Sancho, as well as Coach Spenser Mango. Maroulis and Gray are competing in the women’s freestyle wrestling events. Both athletes attended Marquette Senior High School while participating in the former USOEC women’s freestyle program at NMU. That program ran from 2004-2012. It will be the second Olympics for both athletes, as they participated in the 2016 Games in Rio de Janeiro. In Rio, Maroulis made history by earning Team USA’s first Olympic gold medal in women’s freestyle.

Weightlifter Robles is at her third Olympics. A former NMU student, she won a bronze medal at the 2016 Games in Rio de Janeiro, breaking a 16-year drought for Team USA. SPC Sancho is another former NMU student, who now competes for the United States Army World Class Athlete Program. Competing in Greco-Roman wrestling, this is Sancho’s first Games. Coach Mango is a 2010 NMU graduate. Having represented Team USA as a Greco-Roman wrestler in 2008 and 2012, this year he is attending the Games as a coach.

One final NMU alumnus, Arnoldo Herrara, is competing in Tokyo this year. Although the NMU Olympic Training Site does not include swimming, he was a member of the Wildcat swim team. The December 2019 graduate is representing his home country of Costa Rica in the 200-meter breaststroke.