It’s that time again – the 2024 Summer Olympics in Paris, France, are just around the corner! We know that physicists like to have fun , but usually such extracurricular pursuits are overshadowed by those pesky academic accomplishments and prizes. So, I thought that in honor of the upcoming games, it would be fun to come up with our very own Summer Olympics Dream Team, using photos from the Emilio Segrè Visual Archives.

A couple of things to note before we begin: First, the Dream Team is compiled without regard to nationality. This is our house, and we make the rules.

Second, and more importantly, I want to acknowledge that the Dream Team is made up of mostly white men. This is not because other people didn’t/don’t play sports and it’s not because they weren’t/aren’t scientists! Rather, the archives of the history of physics (and many other archives) have an overrepresentation of white, cisgender men and a severe underrepresentation of other groups. In our collections, there is a particular lack of photos of people from historically marginalized groups having fun and doing things other than being physicists. For example, we know that Julius Taylor , one of the first Black people to receive a PhD in physics, was an avid track athlete and golfer, but our only photos of him are at work . This may not seem like a big deal at first glance, but when we only make space for one aspect of a person’s life, we miss out on understanding that person as a multi-faceted individual and we hinder other people from seeing their full selves reflected in the collection. This issue exists across archives, not just at ours, and it deserves its own, much longer conversation. You can read more about it in this conversation with Temple’s Director of Special Collections , in this blog post about rural New England community archives , and in this web exhibit from Carnegie Mellon , to name a few resources.

Without further ado, I present: The ESVA Summer Olympics Dream Team.

Basketball – Robley Evans and the late 1920s CalTech Basketball Team

Ok, ok, maybe it’s cheating to conscript an entire university basketball team, but in my defense, this is not real.

Robley Evans, born in 1907 in University Place, Nebraska, is best known for his Enrico Fermi Award-winning work studying the health effects of radiation on humans . However, after his family moved to Southern California when he was a child, he spent many of his school years playing school sports. By his own assessment, he wasn’t much of an athlete, but his mother wanted him to do something other than sit inside and read books all day. He went out for track and gymnastics in high school, then joined the basketball, track, and baseball teams at CalTech. Fun fact: Evans was on the track team with Olympic sprint gold medalist Charlie Paddock . No pressure or anything.

Read about Robley Evans’ fledgling athletics career and more in his AIP Oral History , recorded in 1972.

Canoeing – Homer and Margaret Wing Dodge

Homer Dodge was a well-known canoe enthusiast . Born in 1887 in Ogdensburg, NY, near the St. Lawrence River, he was raised by water-loving parents and began rowing around age five. Even as he cultivated a career in physics, focusing on electrical measurements, Dodge pursued his passion for canoeing on the side, continuing to enter competitions well into his 80s. He met his wife, Margaret Wing, in Iowa when she expressed interest in buying a canoe. The couple married in 1917, and from then on, they could be found paddling together wherever they went.

Read more about Homer Dodge in his AIP Oral History , recorded in 1963.

Cycling – Marie and Pierre Curie

Marie and Pierre Curie are 19th century #relationshipgoals. In addition to their shared work on polonium and radium, the two also advocated for each other throughout their careers – Pierre insisted Marie be included as a Nobel Prize recipient in 1903 (the first woman to win the award), and Marie pushed Pierre to finish his doctorate .

The Curies also enjoyed cycling together in their free time; they even spent their honeymoon on a bicycle tour of France (no all-inclusive beach resorts for them, thank you very much). Beyond being good exercise, though, cycling for Marie was a demonstration of independence at a time when women were still strictly confined by traditional gender roles and discouraged from participating in sports. She went on to break several glass ceilings in her field, and today, her passion for cycling is celebrated by cycling charity events worldwide .

Explore this AIP-curated web exhibit to learn more about Marie Curie (and Pierre, too), and check out our blog post about bicycles in the Emilio Segrè Visual Archives.

Equestrian – Robert Oppenheimer

Yep, that Oppenheimer. Before the Manhattan Project, J. Robert Oppenheimer was young man sent to New Mexico by his father to regain his strength after he contracted dysentery in Germany . He learned to ride horses and began horse-packing through the mountains, which started a life-long love of the area. He came across the Los Alamos Ranch School on one of these adventures. He would later advocate for its use as a secret laboratory for the Manhattan Project, forever tying his beloved landscape of New Mexico with the dark history of nuclear armament.

Learn more about Oppenheimer in one of the many articles written about him in AIP’s journal Physics Today, and read the transcript of his brother Frank’s oral history , where he talks about their summers spent riding horses in New Mexico.

Golf – Thomas Osgood

Thomas Osgood was obsessed with golf. Perhaps it was a passion he developed in his native UK while attending the University of St. Andrews, known for its golf courses. Perhaps it was an excuse to go play a round and call it work. Whatever the reason, Osgood dedicated a lot of his time to the physics of golf.

In 1953, Osgood presented his findings at a meeting of physics professors at the University of Iowa. Presumably, they were gathered to discuss pedagogy, but they came away with definitive advice on how to putt effectively (“low and crisply” ). Did all this research improve his game? We may never know.

For more information about Osgood and his golf research, read the full article in the New York Times.

Sailing – Nicolaas Bloembergen

I almost used Albert Einstein for this category because we have a lot of amazing photos of Einstein on a boat , but it turns out he was a very bad sailor ! So instead, we have Nobel laureate, physicist, and very good sailor Nicolaas Bloembergen. Nico, as he was known to friends, grew up in the Netherlands, where his family had a cabin on a lake; it was there that he learned to sail . He would later meet his wife, Deli, at a summer sailing camp organized by a grad student organization at the Kamerlingh Onnes Laboratory in Leiden.

Read more about Bloembergen’s life in his AIP Oral History , recorded in 1983.

Swimming – Enrico Fermi

By all accounts, Enrico Fermi loved the outdoors. We have several images of him hiking, boating, skiing, rock climbing, playing tennis...you name it, but he seemed to especially love swimming. One former colleague, physicist Robert Bacher, recalls encountering Fermi as he began a swim across a lake in Ann Arbor, Michigan: “I remember catching up with him...to tell him that it was 1.5 miles across that lake, but Fermi kept on swimming and went the whole distance. He was a great competitor and loved to win.” Another colleague, physicist Darragh Nagle, described how Fermi was proud of his strength and stamina and would always take the lead in groups.

Read more about Enrico Fermi on the Fermilab website .

Sport Climbing – Lester Germer

Physicist Lester Germer was known for his work establishing the wave properties of electrons and his long career at Bell Labs. Outside the lab, however, he was also an avid rock climber, mountain climber, and hiker. He began his rock-climbing career in 1945 at the ripe young age of 49 and spent the next 26 years leading climbs without a single safety issue. Unfortunately, he died in 1971 of a massive heart attack while leading a climb at Shawangunk Ridge in New York. He was 74. Physics Today reported that he was “best known by the great number of people he stimulated as a result of his curiosity, love of living and intense interest in sharing his excitement with others.”

You can learn more about Germer’s work in this article from the Linda Hall Library .

Tennis – Lev Landau

Finally, for tennis, we have Nobel Prize laureate and theoretical physicist Lev Landau. One of the most well-known Soviet physicists working in the 20th century, Landau was known among his colleagues for his no-nonsense attitude and sharp tongue. He had the right build for a tennis player – tall and lanky, with angular movements – but it is not known how he picked up the sport or just how dedicated he was to it. We do know, however, that it was his practice of playing tennis with mathematician N.G.Chebotarev that led to his understanding of the “theory of groups which was essential for constructing the theory of phase transformations.”

Learn more about Lev Landau in this special edition of Physics Today from February 2004.

That rounds out our ESVA Summer Olympics Dream Team, but I’d love to hear who you would include! Comment below and tell us your favorite physics/sports crossover.