At the London Games, a Gould earns an Olympic gold medal.
We saw it once and perhaps again. In 1908 Jay Gould, then a nineteen year-old, won a gold medal in the sport of real tennis. At Queens Club, he beat Englishman (and thirty-nine year old) Eustice Miles in the finals 6-5, 6-4, 6-4 (Miles was up 5-2 in the first set but couldn’t close it out). Gould’s gold medal has gone missing and no one in his family has it anymore, but the certificate he got still exists and is reproduced below.
In 2012 in London, it is Georgia Gould’s time. The reigning U.S. mountain bike champion, Georgia is aiming at a gold medal on Saturday 11 August when the women’s Olympic mountain bike race is held. She came in eighth in Beijing four years ago.
UPDATE: She got a bronze:
http://sportsillustrated.cnn.com/2012/olympics/2012/writers/austin_murphy/08/…
For more on Georgia, see:
http://georgiagould.com/about/
Georgia is the great-great neice of Jay Gould. Two weeks ago I spent a lovely afternoon in the Catskills with Georgia’s grandfather, Kingdon Gould, Jr., who is Jay Gould’s nephew.
A spry eighty-eight years old, Kingdon showed me many of his uncle’s trophies and his old summer house. He also drove me over to his famous Ice House squash court, one of the most stunning and picturesque squash courts in the world. Opened by Mark Talbott in 1981 and the host of many epic Gould squash matches, the court is now a softball size but still situated inside the giant stone-walled nineteenth-century icehouse.