Stepping to the circle for the last throw of the Olympic hammer final, Camryn Rogers ’23 let no emotion show on her face. She looked focused and poised as she started her spin.
She let the hammer fly, but stumbled out of the ring before the implement—a roughly 9-pound ball on the end of a 4-foot wire—smashed into the turf – a “failure” in the rules of hammer throwing. But it didn’t matter: Rogers had won the gold medal.
“I feel like I went into that throw and tried to stay so focused and so in the zone and kind of failed,” Rogers said in a Team Canada Instagram video about the final throw. “Can’t really hold it against myself, I was just so excited.”
She dropped to a crouch, then placed one hand over her mouth and one in the air. Overcome with emotion, she cried as she celebrated with her competitors, coach, family and friends. With her first-place finish, she became the first Cal track and field athlete to win Olympic gold since 1972.
Rogers has come a long way from the girl who thought the hammer looked like a “murder weapon” when she first picked one up at her school’s track practice in 2012. A three-time NCAA champion at Cal, she finished fifth in Tokyo as the youngest competitor in the field. This year, at 25, she was the clear favorite to win, having arrived in Paris as the reigning world champion and the top ranked women’s hammer thrower in the world.
But Rogers found herself behind for much of the competition, as first China’s Jie Zhou and then America’s Annette Echikunwoke, who competed at the University of Cincinnati, took the lead from her in the second and third rounds respectively. Even after the fourth round, she still sat behind Echikunwoke. But in the fifth, she threw for 76.97 meters, over a meter farther than Echikunwoke’s 75.48 meters. While still short of her personal best and the fifth world all-time throw of 78.62, it was farther than either Echikunwoke or Zhou have ever thrown.
No one surpassed her mark in the sixth round, so when she stepped up to the circle as the final competitor, she already knew she had won the gold.
“It’s a whirlwind of emotions, but the second the competition was over, I felt like I just went into shock,” Rogers told CBC Sports. “I looked up, and I saw my coach and my family, who came all the way here from Richmond, B.C., from New Zealand, from California, and I just felt nothing but love and support and the fact I could share this moment with them is what makes it special for me.”
Later, when speaking with Team Canada, Rogers tested the medal in her hand.
“It weighs almost as much as a hammer, I feel like,” she said. “Just wait until I start whipping it around.”
Her win added to Cal’s impressive collection of five golds in the 2024 Olympics. In total, Cal matched the school record for most medals accrued in a single Olympics: 23, including the aforementioned five gold medals, eight silvers, and 10 bronze.
Cal also earned the second-most medals of all schools in the country: just behind the school that shall not be named to the south, whose athletes earned a record-breaking 39 medals. Still, if Cal was its own country, it would’ve ranked 12th in the overall medal count.
Rogers joined three medaling track athletes. Fellow thrower Mykolas Alekna ’25, who set the world record earlier this year, took the silver in the men’s discus for his home country of Lithuania.
Georgia Bell ’17 got the bronze in the 1500m run for Great Britain. Bell, who owns the seventh-fastest 1500 time at Cal, took several years off from track before starting the sport again just about two years ago. She is Cal’s first British Olympic medalist.
The Cal squad that collected the most hardware was swimming, with ten medals in the pool. Ryan Murphy ’17, Jack Alexy ’25, Hunter Armstong, and Abbey Weitzeil ’20 all helped earn medals as part of relays, and Murphy also won an individual bronze in the 100 backstroke.
Competing for various countries, rowers Olav Molenaar ’22, Ollie Maclean ’23, Sydney Payne ’19, Caileigh Filmer ’17, Christian Tabash ’23, and Rowan McKellar ’17 all collected prizes. In water polo, Adrian Weinberg ’23, Luca Cupido ’17, Johnny Hooper ’18, Kitty Lyn Joustra ’21, and coach Gavin Arroyo ’93 were all part of teams that earned a collective four medals.
Needless to say, it was a successful week for Cal athletes. With Paris having now come to a close, Cal’s all-time medal count is 246. Pretty amazing. But to reprise our Olympic preview, a challenge remains: maybe one of these Games, the Bears will bring home more medals than that school down in Palo Alto.
