And then there were all the people who inspired and challenged him athletically, like track coaches Ed Kilkelly, Arthur O’Connor, and Jack Brown—to say nothing of Fordham track’s most famous alumnus, two-time Olympic gold medalist Tom Courtney, FCRH ’55.

Courtney enjoyed “a certain degree of royalty” at Fordham, said Ostling, who met him during one of his many visits to campus.

These and other recollections come up as Ostling discusses his recent major gift to Fordham’s track and field and cross country programs in honor of coaches O’Connor and Brown.

By giving, he seeks to help today’s student-athletes have the best possible experience—like he did.

“I thought it was time to try to help make a difference” for them, Ostling said.

A Lesson in Giving

Ostling, who retired as chief operating officer at EY, formerly Ernst & Young, earned his bachelor’s degree from Fordham’s former Undergraduate School of Education before enrolling in Fordham Law School. A longtime generous donor to the school, he is quick to praise all the people who made a mark on his personal and professional growth—from coaches to classmates to colleagues in his legal career.

Those who inspired his philanthropy include a past dean of the law school, Joseph M. McLaughlin, FCRH ’54, LAW ’59, who made a lasting impression with a quick act of generosity. It happened when Ostling was being interviewed by McLaughlin after first arriving at the law school as a recently commissioned military officer, wearing his U.S. Marine Corps uniform.

Expressing concern about Ostling’s ability to pay for a more diverse wardrobe, McLaughlin turned around and wrote him a generous check, only asking that Ostling pay it back when he could.

“I can’t tell you what that meant to me,” Ostling said. “I guess he knew a lot about my financial background and that sort of thing from my application. That moment of him without any need to, or request, turning around and doing that just made a huge [difference].”

He noted that his gift to Fordham track followed Courtney’s death last fall, so in a way it helps continue Courtney’s unstinting support for the program.

“My aspiration is that the young men and women at Fordham who participate in track and cross country have the chance to feel the same experience I felt,” Ostling said. “I had a great academic experience, a great social experience, a great athletic experience at Fordham.”

Athletics fundraising is one of the pillars of Fordham’s $350 million fundraising campaign, Cura Personalis | For Every Fordham Student. Learn more and make a gift. 

“Tom was a true man of Fordham, and we are proud to call him a Ram,” said Ed Kull, director of athletics at the University. “He will forever be in the Fordham history books, and his character, persistence, and determination will continue to inspire our Rams for generations.”

As a track star at Fordham, Courtney won numerous individual titles. He also anchored the Rams’ relay team that set a two-mile world record at the Los Angeles Coliseum Relays on May 21, 1954. Sports Illustrated featured him in his Fordham gear on the cover of its May 2, 1955, issue, one month before he earned a bachelor’s degree in political philosophy from Fordham College at Rose Hill.

Courtney’s renown only grew after graduation, when he represented the U.S. at the 1956 Summer Olympics in Melbourne, Australia. He earned two gold medals—first in one of the most dramatic 800-meter races in Olympic history, then as the anchor of the 1,600-meter relay team.

“Few men have worked as hard and achieved such personal fame in such a short time as Fordham’s Tom Courtney,” student reporters Ronald Land and Bill Sturner wrote in The Ram less than two weeks later, upon Courtney’s triumphant return to campus.

A Record-Setting Track Star

Courtney was born on August 17, 1933, in South Orange, New Jersey. He grew up in nearby Livingston with dreams of becoming a professional baseball pitcher like his father, who had signed with the New York Yankees in 1928 and played in the minor leagues. Courtney played baseball and basketball, then switched to track in his junior year at James Caldwell High School in West Caldwell.

He received track scholarship offers from several universities, including Georgetown, Villanova, and Yale. He chose a full scholarship from Fordham after meeting coach Artie O’Connor at a New Jersey state meet. It was a decision that thrilled his mother, he once wrote, because her cousin Charlie Deubel was a 1935 Fordham graduate who had captained the Rams’ track team.

“While most runners are slender and wiry, Tom was broad-shouldered and muscular,” Raymond Schroth, S.J., FCRH ’55, wrote in his book Fordham: A History and Memoir, adding that the 6-foot-2-inch Courtney was “absolutely driven” and that “nothing was to get between Tom and his running.”

While competing for Fordham, Courtney won numerous high-profile races, including the 1,000-yard Metropolitan Collegiate and IC4A championships. He set a U.S. record in the 400-yard final at the Metropolitan AAU championship and a world record in the 600-yard final at the intercollegiate indoor championships. At the Washington Star games, an international invitational, Courtney bested the University of Pittsburgh’s Arnie Sowell, then considered the best runner in the world, by five strides.

He formed a tight bond with his Fordham teammates Terry Foley, FCRH ’54, Frank Tarsney, FCRH ’54, and Bill Persichetty, GABELLI ’54. With Courtney as the anchor, the Rams’ “Fabulous Four” two-mile relay team recorded 13 straight wins in 1954.

Courtney also developed a close relationship with O’Connor, a 1928 Fordham graduate. During Courtney’s junior year, the coach “began mentioning the word Olympics to his star,” Father Schroth wrote. “For the next year and a half his training became both grueling and methodical as he kept a daily log of everything he did,” hoping to qualify for the 1956 games in Melbourne.

Qualifying for the Olympics—and a Date with Grace Kelly

Courtney had been a cadet in the Air Force ROTC program at Fordham, and after graduating in 1955, he was drafted into the Army. While completing basic training at Fort Dix in New Jersey, he continued to prepare for the Olympics, sometimes sneaking out of his bunk at night to run along the camp fence.

“After I graduated from Fordham, I was on my own,” Courtney recalled in his 2018 memoir, The Inside Track. “But I knew what to do and each day I tried to improve, to work a little harder, and to become a little faster.”

The Olympic trials were held in Los Angeles in July 1956, and Courtney made the team. Later, he and Olympic rower Jack Kelly Jr. were asked to model the official apparel members of the U.S. team would wear in Melbourne. They became friends, and “he asked me if I would go on a date with his sister, Grace Kelly, of movie fame,” Courtney wrote in his memoir. “We had a nice time and I asked her for another date. She said she was going to Monaco the next week, and the next thing I knew she was getting engaged to Prince Rainier.”

‘The Most Courageous Race I’ve Seen’

On November 26, 1956, the day of the 800-meter final at the Melbourne Olympics, Courtney’s nerves nearly got the better of him.

“As I stepped on the track, my legs went rubbery,” he wrote in The Inside Track. “I found that I could not stand up and I sagged to the grass. I saw the hundred thousand people in the stands, and thought, is it possible that I am so nervous that I won’t be able to run today?”

He took an early lead, then lagged behind his U.S. teammate and college rival, Arnie Sowell, who was favored to win the race. With 120 yards to go, Courtney made a move and eventually caught Sowell “on the turn and slowly passed him,” he later wrote, only to see Great Britain’s Derek Johnson spurt past him with just 50 yards to go.

“The sprint was over for me, my legs were getting rubbery, my head was bobbling, and my body stiffening. I was finished. … But I looked at the tape with just 40 yards to go and realized this was the only chance I would ever have to win the Olympics,” he wrote. “I did not want to finish thinking I might have put a little more into it. I leaned as far forward as I could and threw my arms out ahead of me.”

He crossed the tape one-tenth of a second ahead of Johnson, finishing with a time of 1:47.7, before collapsing from exhaustion.

Journalist Bob Considine later called it “the most courageous race I’ve seen in 25 years of sportswriting.”

Courtney, however, was experiencing “a new kind of agony,” he later wrote. “I had never run myself into such a state. My head was exploding, my stomach ripping, and even the tips of my fingers ached. The only thing I could think was, ‘If I live, I will never run again!”

Five days later, he not only ran again, he earned his second gold medal, as the anchor of the 1,600-meter relay team. The 1956 Olympics were the last not shown live on television, so Courtney had to call his parents in Livingston to tell them he had won.

“Why was trying to win the 800 meters, the 400 meters, and the relay so important to me?” Courtney wrote in The Inside Track. “There was a poem by Sterling W. Sill taped to our refrigerator as we grew up. It read, ‘The average man’s complacent when he has done his best to score, but the champion does his best, and then he does a little more.’ I guess I saw triple in that quote.”

A Homecoming Parade in the Bronx

Upon returning to New York, Courtney appeared on The Ed Sullivan Show, and on December 12, 1956, his alma mater threw him a parade in the Bronx, from Poe Park on the Grand Concourse to the Rose Hill Gymnasium, where he received a “huge, triple-decked, silver trophy” from Fordham President Laurence J. McGinley, S.J., The Ram reported the next day.

The Fordham University Band led the procession through the Bronx, followed by the student body and the Livingston High School band. Wearing his white Olympics sport coat and a straw hat, Courtney rode down Fordham Road in the back of an open-top orange Cadillac—an experience he recounted in his memoir.

“That was a lovely time,” he wrote, “and I was in a convertible with my coach, Artie O’Connor. He was very motivational for me. As we went along, he took my losses much harder than I did. He was a dedicated, wonderful man. He loved Fordham and it helped me to love Fordham.”

Raising a Family, Building a Career

After the Fordham parade, Courtney returned to an Army base in Boston and continued to compete, setting a world record for the indoor 600-meter before retiring from competition in 1957, the same year he received an honorable discharge from the Army.

Two years later, he earned an M.B.A. from Harvard University (where he also served as an assistant track coach), setting the stage for a long, successful career in finance. He became a senior vice president of finance at Peninsular Insurance Company in 1962, and later worked as an investor at several firms before forming his own, Courtney Associates, in 1983. He specialized in portfolio management and venture capital before retiring in 2002.

In 1963, he married Posy L’Hommedieu. Together they had three sons: Tom Jr., Peter (who earned an M.B.A. from Fordham’s Gabelli School of Business in 1997), and Frank.

A Loyal Ram—and an Inspiration for Student-Athletes

Over the years, Courtney remained a loyal Fordham graduate and generous financial supporter of the University. He made gifts to the men’s and women’s track and field program, to the Fordham Fund, and the Joseph A. O’Hare, S.J., Endowed Presidential Scholarship Fund.

Courtney also was a frequent attendee at Jubilee reunion weekends at Rose Hill and regional alumni events in Florida, and while he could not attend the June 2022 reunion celebrations in person, he spoke with attendees via Zoom. With his wife, Posy, at his side in Florida, he took questions from his longtime friend and former Fordham track teammate Bob Mackin, FCRH ’55, in the Bronx.

“Fordham was a wonderful place, and I’m thankful for my experience there—and my scholarship too,” Courtney told the assembled Jubilarians and guests.

Along with Fordham and NFL football legend Vince Lombardi, FCRH ’37, Courtney was one of the first five people to be inducted into the Fordham Athletics Hall of Fame when it was established in 1971. He was inducted into the University’s Hall of Honor in 2011. And in 2016, to kick off Fordham’s track and field season, the program honored Courtney with a banner unveiling ceremony at the Vincent T. Lombardi Memorial Center at Rose Hill.

At his virtual Jubilee appearance in June 2022, Courtney received a special thank-you from Brian Horowitz, FCRH ’10, GSE ’11, head coach of the men’s track and field and cross country teams.

“Walking into the Lombardi Center each day and seeing the Olympic rings and knowing that you represented Fordham so well is a real inspiration for myself as a coach and for the current members of the team,” Horowitz said. “We hope to continue to make you proud.”

In addition to his wife, Posy, and their three sons, Courtney is survived by a brother, Kevin, and nine grandchildren.

—Adam Kaufman and Ryan Stellabotte

Watch Tom Courtney’s come-from-behind victory in the 800-meter race during the 1956 Summer Olympics. In this clip from “Greatest Thrills from the Olympics,” produced in the lead-up to the 1960 Olympics, host Bob Considine interviews Courtney, calling his epic victory “the most courageous race I’ve seen in 25 years of sportswriting.”

With his wife, Margaret “Posy” Courtney, by his side, two-time Olympic gold medalist Tom Courtney, FCRH ’55, joined the reunion festivities by Zoom from Florida. He took questions from his longtime friend and former Fordham track teammate Bob Mackin, FCRH ’55, who was among those in Loyola Hall.

Prior to the discussion, audience members watched a video of Courtney’s dramatic come-from-behind victory in the 800-meter race on November 26, 1956, at the Summer Olympics in Melbourne, Australia. Courtney—who later said he was proud to be described in the Melbourne newspapers as “The Fordham Ram”—set an Olympic record that day with a time of 1:47.7 before nearly collapsing from exhaustion.

“I was totally, absolutely spent,” he recalled during the reunion event. “All I could think of is, ‘I am in such bad, painful condition, I will never run again.’”

But he ran the next day, and several days later, on December 1, he anchored the U.S. team’s four-man 1,600-meter relay, winning his second gold medal. Because it was the last Olympics not broadcast live on television, he had to call his parents in Livingston, New Jersey, to let them know that he won.

Upon returning to New York, Courtney appeared on the Ed Sullivan Show, and on December 12, 1956, Fordham feted him with a dinner at Mamma Leone’s restaurant in Manhattan and a parade in the Bronx—from Poe Park on the Grand Concourse to the Rose Hill Gymnasium, where he received a “huge, triple-decked, silver trophy” from Fordham President Laurence J. McGinley, S.J., The Ram reported the next day.

“Few men have worked as hard and achieved such personal fame in such a short time as Fordham’s Tom Courtney,” Ram reporters Ronald Land and Bill Sturner wrote.

The Fordham University Band led the procession through the Bronx, followed by the student body and the Livingston High School band. Wearing his white Olympics sport coat and a straw hat, Courtney rode down Fordham Road in the back of an open-top orange Cadillac—an experience he recounted in his 2018 memoir, The Inside Track.

“That was a lovely time,” he wrote, “and I was in a convertible with my coach, Artie O’Connor,” a 1928 Fordham graduate who offered Courtney a full scholarship and was the first to suggest that he try to make the U.S. Olympic team. “He was very motivational for me. As we went along, he took my losses much harder than I did. He was a dedicated, wonderful man. He loved Fordham and it helped me to love Fordham.”

After the Olympics, Courtney continued to set world records in 1956 and 1957 before retiring from competition. In 1971, he was one of the first five people, including Vince Lombardi, FCRH ’37, to be inducted into the Fordham Athletics Hall of Fame. He earned an M.B.A. from Harvard University and enjoyed a long career in business, retiring in 2011 as chairman of the board of Oppenheimer Funds.

“Fordham was a wonderful place, and I’m thankful for my experience there—and my scholarship too,” said Courtney, who for many years has been a generous supporter of the University.

Brian Horowitz, FCRH ’10, GSE ’11, head coach of the Fordham men’s track and field and cross country teams, thanked Courtney for his support of the program’s student-athletes.

“Walking into the Lombardi Center each day and seeing the Olympic rings and knowing that you represented Fordham so well is a real inspiration for myself as a coach and for the current members of the team,” Horowitz said. “We hope to continue to make you proud.”

Watch Courtney’s inspiring effort in this clip from Greatest Thrills from the Olympics. Host Bob Considine interviews Courtney, calling his run “the most courageous race I’ve seen in 25 years of sportswriting.”

Bringing Bronze Back to Ireland

Fiona Murtagh, FCRH ’16, won a bronze medal as part of Ireland’s women’s coxless four rowing team on July 27. Murtagh, an Irish native, rowed for Fordham as an undergraduate after transferring from the National University of Ireland in Galway. As a Ram, she led women’s rowing to two victories at the Head of Charles regatta and was named to the All-Atlantic 10 first team in 2016.

In early August, Murtagh arrived back to her hometown of Moycullen, in County Galway, with fans cheering her on amid celebratory bonfires. After spending a month before the Olympics in a training bubble, Murtagh told The Irish Times, “We deserve a break to spend time with family and friends. It’s been so long since we have seen anyone.”

Forget Tokyo, the real Olympic village is Moycullen this evening! A homecoming to welcome back rowing medallist Fiona Murtagh – not every day an Olympic medal comes through the parish. #Olympics #Tokyo2020 pic.twitter.com/s3wjKOY6pN

— Dr. Barry Houlihan (@stagedreaction) August 1, 2021

A ‘Gutsy’ Performance from a U.S. Pitcher

Soon after Murtagh received a hero’s welcome in Ireland, former Rams pitcher Nick Martinez took the mound as the U.S. baseball team’s starting pitcher in the gold medal game against Japan on August 7. He earned the starting nod after striking out nine and picking up a win against South Korea in the group stage. Although the U.S. fell to Japan, 2-0, to claim the silver medal, Martinez made a strong showing, striking out seven batters over six innings while allowing one run. In the publication’s game recap, USA Today called Martinez’s performance “gutsy” and stated that he “[kept]the U.S. in the ball game.”

Martinez, who was drafted by the Texas Rangers in 2011, after his junior year at the Gabelli School of Business, made his Major League Baseball debut for the Rangers in 2014 and started 68 games for the team over four seasons—including several games at Yankee Stadium. He has been pitching professionally in Japan since 2018, first for the Hokkaido Nippon-Ham Fighters and currently for the Fukuoka SoftBank Hawks.

Rowing for Gold and Silver in St. Louis

Martinez and Murtagh are not the first Rams to take their places on the Olympic podium. In 1904, at the summer games in St. Louis, 1894 Fordham graduate John J. F. “Jack” Mulcahy and his partner, William Varley, won gold and silver for the U.S. in two rowing events: the double sculls and pair without coxswain, respectively. Mulcahy had developed an interest in rowing at an early age, at a time when the Harlem River played host to popular regattas.

After the Olympics, Mulcahy worked briefly as a New York City alderman and as vice president of Midvale Steel Company. He returned to Fordham in 1915 to help the University launch its rowing program and served as the team’s inaugural coach. Vincent M. Doherty, a 1918 graduate and a member of the 1915 freshman crew, recalled that Mulcahy “was a stern master,” but that “he had the affection and respect of every man on the squad.”

A Steeplechase Medal as a Student

At 1932’s Summer Olympics in Los Angeles, Joe McCluskey, then a Fordham junior, won bronze in the steeplechase—a seven-and-a-half-lap race that includes both standard hurdles and water jumps. In his 2002 obituary, The New York Times noted that had officials not made a mistake in lap counts, McCluskey would have won silver.

In the 1933 edition of the Fordham Maroon yearbook, McCluskey’s entry read, “Any introduction to this son of Fordham would be superfluous for he is known to every man on the campus because of his athletic conquests,” and his classmates recognized him as the student who had “Done Most for Fordham.” Throughout his career, McCluskey won 27 U.S. track and field titles.

“I don’t think I had as much ability as some others,” he once said, “but I put more into it. When you can’t stand at the end of a race, you know you’ve given everything. I ran a lot of races when I couldn’t stand at the end.”

Double Gold and an Olympic Record

Also willing to push himself to exhaustion was Tom Courtney, FCRH ’55, who won the gold medal for the United States in the men’s 800-meter race at the 1956 Summer Olympics in Melbourne, Australia.

“It was a new kind of agony for me,” Courtney recalled of the race, in which he set an Olympic record time of 1:47.7. “I had never run myself into such a state. My head was exploding, my stomach ripping, and even the tips of my fingers ached.”

Five days after that race, he earned another gold medal, as the anchor of the U.S.’s four-man, 1,600-meter relay team.

“When I got back to the States, I appeared on the Ed Sullivan Show,” Courtney wrote in his memoir, The Inside Track (Page Publishing, 2018). “There was a big party at Leone’s Restaurant, and a wonderful parade down Fordham Road. I was in a convertible with my coach, Artie O’Conner. He was very motivational for me. … He loved Fordham and it helped me to love Fordham.”

After the Olympics, Courtney went on to earn an M.B.A. from Harvard and had a long career in business. He retired in 2011 as chairman of the board of Oppenheimer Funds.

Mulcahy, McCluskey, and Courtney are all members of the Fordham University Athletics Hall of Fame.

As director general of the International Surfing Association from 2010 to 2014 and the publisher of Surfing Magazine before that, Mignogna has spent most of his life surrounded by the sport he loves—and trying to bring it to more people around the world.

Called to the North Shore

A Queens native, Mignogna moved to Long Island with his family when he was 11. It was there that he began surfing, finding time for his passion while attending Bishop Reilly High School. He grew up in a devout Catholic household, and his appreciation for Jesuit education, along with a desire to stay in New York City, made Fordham a natural choice for him when it came time for college.

After earning a degree in finance, he taught at St. Rita’s Catholic School in Long Island City, Queens, while taking graduate courses in education at St. John’s University. Meanwhile, he remained drawn to the ocean, surfing in his spare time and diligently reading Surfer and Surfing magazines. He found himself especially enraptured by Drew Kampion’s writing about the North Shore on Oahu, Hawaii, where surfers from across the country and beyond gathered to ride some of the best waves around and enjoy the laid-back beach culture.

“I fantasized about wanting to live that lifestyle that he talked about and that was in those pictures that I saw,” Mignogna recalls. “And after my third year of teaching, I made a relatively spontaneous decision that I was not going to go back.”

Mignogna arrived in Hawaii in September 1973 and made his way straight to the North Shore. He had saved enough money that he was able to focus solely on surfing and surf photography. He began to sell some of his photos to magazines in the United States and abroad, and the following summer, he got an assignment from Surfing to take photos at the U.S. Championships in Cape Hatteras, North Carolina. A few months later, after a meeting with a staff member, he took an ad sales job at the magazine and moved to California.

Growing Surfing and Joining the ISA

Mignogna quickly realized the magazine needed to set itself apart from its rival publication, Surfer. He thought it could do that by focusing on the push to professionalize the sport.

“That tactic became a long-term strategy, and it wound up working,” Mignogna says. “We not only became the magazine of pro surfing, we eventually became the number one [surfing]magazine in the world.”

In the years that followed, Mignogna moved up the masthead at Surfing, eventually becoming publisher. He also got involved with numerous trade organizations and environmental nonprofits, including the Surfrider Foundation and the Surf Industry Manufacturers Association.

Through these organizations and the magazine, which he left in 2003, Mignogna made a vast network of connections in the surf world. One of those connections was with Fernando Aguerre, the Argentinian founder and owner of sandal company Reef, who had become president of the International Surfing Association (ISA) in 1994.

As an advertiser with Surfing, Aguerre had grown close to Mignogna, and when he was looking for someone to oversee the day-to-day operations of ISA in 2010, he turned to the former publisher. As director general, Mignogna helped to increase the organization’s revenues, introducing annual events and expanding the number of member nations.

The Long Road to the Olympics

Since the 1990s, one of Aguerre’s priorities had been to work with the International Olympic Committee (IOC) to make surfing an Olympic sport—a goal first stated in 1912 by Duke Kahanamoku, a medal-winning Olympic swimmer from Hawaii. With Mignogna on board, that push intensified. He traveled to Lausanne, Switzerland, several times a year to meet with IOC officials and update them on the continued growth of professional surfing—and the sport’s readiness for the big stage.

Mignogna left ISA in 2014, but thanks in part to groundwork he laid, the IOC voted in 2016 to approve surfing as an Olympic sport, and the following year, the Tokyo Organising Committee approved the sport for the 2020 games.

On July 23, after a year’s delay because of the COVID-19 pandemic, Mignogna watched as Lucca Mesinas and Daniella Rosas, two surfers from Peru, carried in their country’s flag during the opening ceremony. He has a special affinity for Peru, where he spent much time helping to develop surfing competitions, and from where he brought a surfer who is the son of a seventh-generation indigenous fisherman and waterman to speak to the IOC. As he watched the games, it was evident to him that for many nations, the sport can function as a path to glory.

“These kids know that they’ll be a hero in their country if they ever get to surf for their country on the Olympic surfing team,” Mignogna says. “They will be a sports hero.”

Dedication to a Sport and to Family

The belief that surfing can be a positive force in people’s lives has been at the heart of Mignogna’s career. He initially took the ad sales job at Surfing, he says, because he thought he could help reach young people and instill in them a passion for the sport.

When it comes to wanting to make an impact, he says he is inspired by his father, Ferdinand, who as assistant postmaster for the United States Postal Service’s Long Island City branch created a religious reading room for workers of any religion to pray and have access to sacred texts. When he died in 1975, the office honored him with a bronze plaque to commemorate his service. It reads, “For a lifetime of devotion and dedication to the improvement of the quality of life of his fellow man.”

“I’ll be 72 next month,” Mignogna says, reflecting on his own life’s work and what surfing’s place at the Olympics means to him. “The runway is shorter in front of me than behind me. So I do spend a fair amount of time thinking about, ‘Did I accomplish some big objective in my life? And do the people who matter to me, my three kids, do they see that?’

“And, so I look at it now and I go, ‘Okay, Bob, you owe it to yourself to take some degree of satisfaction out of this.’”

Fiona Murtagh, FCRH ’16; incoming student Alexander Gadegaard Shah; and alumnus Nick Martinez are competing in rowing, swimming, and baseball, respectively.

Murtagh, a native of Galway, is rowing for Ireland. She arrived at Fordham in 2013 and made her mark on the rowing program immediately, with the Fordham club winning the Head of Charles regatta in Boston two years in a row.

The first win, in 2013, was the first time a Fordham women’s crew had won at the prestigious regatta. Murtagh also earned first-team All-Atlantic 10 honors in 2016 when she helped the Rams to a third-place team finish.

In Tokyo, Murtagh and her Irish teammates placed second in the women’s coxless four on July 23 and qualified for the final, which will take place on July 26.

UPDATE: Murtagh and the Women’s Four won the Bronze–Ireland’s first medal in the Tokyo games.

Shah, who will start at Fordham College at Rose Hill this fall, is one of five athletes representing Nepal at the Olympics this year.

A member of this year’s recruiting class for men’s swimming, he was the team MVP and team captain at the Lincoln School in Kathmandu, Nepal, finishing with multiple school and national records. He then swam for Nepal Swimming, earning their team MVP award in 2019, and earned a wild card qualifier spot for the Tokyo 2020 Olympics.

He will swim the 100-meter freestyle, which is set to begin on July 27 and finish on July 29.

Martinez, a native of Miami, is on the baseball roster for Team USA. He attended Fordham for three years, where he was a starting second baseman and a relief pitcher. He is Fordham’s first baseball Olympian since Bobby Kingsbury, who played for Team Greece in 2004.

Martinez was drafted by the Texas Rangers in 2011 and played for the team’s farm system and the major league team until 2018 when he signed a contract to pitch for the Hokkaido Nippon Ham Fighters in Japan. He currently pitches for the Fukuoka SoftBank Hawks in the Japanese League. Team USA will open the Olympic Games baseball tournament on Friday, July 30, against Israel. They join the Dominican Republic, Israel, Japan, Korea, and Mexico in the six-team field.

As one of the Mets beat reporters for WFUV, Fordham’s public media service, Furlong spent the day at Citi Field. He watched from the press level as the Nationals beat the Mets, 3-2, then rushed down to the interview room for Mets manager Terry Collins’ postgame press conference, and headed to the Mets clubhouse to collect audio from players Jacob deGrom and Seth Lugo before choosing the best sound bites for FUV’s Monday morning sportscast.

In the past few years, Furlong has taken on myriad roles at WFUV, and on Nov. 1, at the station’s annual On the Record fundraiser, he’ll receive the Bob Ahrens Award for Excellence in Sports Journalism.

The award, given annually to a member of the WFUV sports staff who’s excelled on and off the air and demonstrated strong leadership ability, bears the name of the station’s longtime executive sports producer. Ahrens, who retired earlier this year after two decades at WFUV, currently serves as a consultant during the transition to his successor, Rick Schultz, FCRH ’98.

Furlong says he’s honored to be chosen, and that it’s especially meaningful because of the award’s namesake. “Bob Ahrens has been a second father to me at Fordham,” he says. “He’s been a mentor to me, in and out of the studio.”

Preparing to Work Alongside the Pros 

Furlong initially chose Fordham for its swimming team, and he competed for two years, but he knew he ultimately wanted to go into journalism. During his sophomore year, he came across WFUV’s table at a club fair. Impressed by the professional nature of the station, he signed up.

Like all members of the WFUV sports department, Furlong learned the ropes during an intensive year-long training program. In one semester, students learn the basics of radio production, like how to use the station’s recorders and computers. In the other, they rotate through various roles in a mock talk show, getting experience as a host, update anchor, producer, and engineer. And that’s all on top of workshops and informal conversations that teach students how to conduct themselves with professionalism in the press box.

“The standards we’re teaching are not college standards,” Ahrens says. “They’re professional standards. Because those are the standards by which they’re going to get judged when they get out of here.”

Reporting and Producing

By the end of his training, Furlong began to get involved in actual WFUV broadcasts, both as a producer and in an on-air role. He also landed his first internship, with CBS New York. During his junior year, he started working on Fordham football broadcasts, then landed another internship, this time with SNY.

As the year went on, his role continued to expand at FUV: He traveled with the men’s and women’s basketball teams and served as the field engineer on those broadcasts. He did play-by-play for Fordham’s baseball, soccer, and water polo teams. And at the start of the 2017 baseball season, he was named one of the station’s two Mets beat reporters, covering roughly half the team’s home games as well as events like this summer’s Baseball Hall of Fame induction and the 2017 MLB All-Star Game. 

Leading Younger Students, Looking Ahead 

As summer turned to fall, Furlong was preparing to switch to sharing the Islanders beat at FUV, while also working as a field producer and color commentator on Rams basketball games. He’ll have a hand in FUV’s One on One sports talk show, which airs on Saturday afternoons and Wednesday evenings, alternating between hosting and working on the production side. He’s also helping lead this year’s training program for the next group of WFUV staffers.

“John assumes a lot of the coaching and teaching roles with the younger students coming into the sports department, because I think he felt that that’s what was done for him,” says Schultz.

This winter will bring another golden opportunity: Furlong will travel to South Korea to work as a production assistant for NBC Sports during the Winter Olympics in Pyeongchang.

“Every door that has opened to me in my career has been opened by WFUV,” says Furlong, who wants to work on the production side of broadcasting when he graduates. Looking ahead, he says the training and experience he’s received at WFUV have given him confidence that he’ll thrive in the industry.

“Whenever they show a shot of the control room during an ESPN radio broadcast, [I see that] we have the same equipment as they do. Literally. It’s like, ‘I could run that board right now. I could probably go produce that show if I wanted to,’ which is really cool to think about.”

—Joe DeLessio, FCLC ’06

“It was a new kind of agony for me,” he later wrote. “My head was exploding, my stomach ripping, and even the tips of my fingers ached. The only thing I could think was, ‘If I live, I will never run again.’”

Courtney did run again, however. Five days later, he anchored the U.S. team’s four-man 1,600-meter relay, earning a second gold medal. He was inducted into the Fordham Athletics Hall of Fame in 1971, and USA Track & Field inducted him into its Hall of Fame in 1978 as one of the best middle-distance runners of his generation.

VIDEO: Watch Courtney’s inspiring effort in this clip from the Greatest Thrills from the Olympics. Host Bob Considine interviews Courtney, calling his run “the most courageous race I’ve seen in 25 years of sportswriting.” (Race begins at 1:25.)

Four years later, her leap of faith paid off. She surprised track fans this past summer by earning a spot on the U.S. national team at the world championships in Beijing. Now she’s training for next July’s Olympic trials—one big step closer to her dream of competing at the 2016 Summer Games in Brazil.

How did your family respond to your career move?

We’re all pretty practical people, my family, and we’re all very close. When I told my dad, he sat me down in the living room and reminded me that I’d be giving up a salary, benefits, and a pretty clear path forward. He wanted me to know that it was going to take a lot of work [to make it as a pro runner], and it was a very long shot that it would turn into anything. Once I made up my mind, though, my family was supportive. They didn’t give me any pressure not to run.

How did it go at first?

We were entering an Olympic year, London 2012, and my big goal was to make trials. Most people talk about the Olympics—I knew that was not realistic at that point. I needed an eight-second jump in my personal best time to reach 4:12.9, the qualifying standard for the 1500-meter race. I had made big jumps, but at a certain point they get really hard to make. Not getting on the line at trials was a big wake-up call. It wasn’t the definition of a smart goal.

You made a big jump this year, bringing your time down to 4:03.56. How do you account for that?

I don’t want to say I was undertrained or underdeveloped, but I am kind of a late bloomer in the sport. Every year in college, I dropped almost 10 seconds, mostly because my initial times were unimpressive. But I had no idea there was a 4:03 in me at that point. If you had told me, I wouldn’t have believed it.

Is getting to the Olympics a smart goal now?

The dream didn’t become real until this year, when I made the world championships team. Now that I know I’m capable of it, it’s a very real goal for me. I want to get to the final and be among the top three at the Olympic trials.

Did you ever doubt that you did the right thing leaving Morgan Stanley?

That came up quite a bit, particularly after not making the trials in 2012. I ended up getting sick at the end of that year because I was training over my head. I considered moving on, but I had made a decision and wanted to see it through.

What compels you to run?

That competitive nature that athletes have—that’s what kept me engaged in the beginning. I wasn’t really fast at the start. Every time you get to a new level, there’s more work to do. That can sound demoralizing, but it’s more motivating for me than anything else. As long as I can rise to each challenge, I’ll see how high I can go.

—Interview conducted, edited, and condensed by Ryan Stellabotte.