Bay Area Athletes to Watch at the Paris 2024 Olympic Games

The Paris Olympics is almost upon us and with over 10,000 athletes competing in 32 sports, it can be tough to know what to watch and who to root for. In the interest of narrowing down your viewing options, here then are the incredible Bay Area athletes who’ll be competing in Paris.

Artistic Swimming

Jacklyn Luu hails from Milpitas, is a graduate student at Stanford University and a proud, second-generation Vietnamese American. She can also — like the rest of her artistic swimming team — hold her breath underwater for a frighteningly long time. This is one of the most captivating sports of the Summer Olympics, and this is the first year the U.S. women’s team has made it to the team event since 2008. Go, Jacklyn!

Badminton

Imagine being the parent of an Olympian. The pride! The awe! The near-constant desire to smugly point at your perfectly formed offspring and say, “Look what I made!” Now imagine being the parents of 24-year-old twin sisters Kerry and Annie Xu. These San José-born, UC Berkeley graduates will be playing as a doubles team, having taken up badminton at the age of 8. Their friends at Milpitas’ Bay Badminton Club, where they’ve been training for the last 14 years, will be cheering them on every step of the way — just probably not as loudly as their parents.

The twins aren’t the Bay’s only badminton talent heading to Paris. Fremont’s Jennie Gai and Foster City’s Joshua Yuan will also be hitting the courts. Yuan has openly admitted that when he first started playing at South San Francisco’s Bay Badminton Center, he “didn’t like it, [but] my parents forced me to continue.” Gai also once said that her folks gave her the choice of tennis or badminton, and she landed on the latter because “tennis is too much sun.” Proof positive that wonderful things can come from forcing your reluctant children to exercise.

Basketball

Warriors head coach Steve Kerr and Steph Curry are off to Paris. It’ll be Kerr’s second Olympics, having coached at the 2021 Tokyo Games, but Curry’s first time. Grant Hill, managing director of USA Basketball, said Curry was “almost giddy” when he found out he’d make the cut. Show ’em how it’s done, Chef Curry.

Hayward’s Chelsea Gray and Walnut Creek’s Sabrina Ionescu will be holding things down on the women’s team. Gray already has a gold medal from Tokyo and is probably about to get another — the USA women’s basketball team has won for the last seven consecutive Olympics. Ionescu is a perfect addition to keep that roll going. Last year, she set an NBA record at the annual 3-point competition, scoring 37 out of a potential 40 points.

Decathlon

It takes a special kind of (masochistic?) competitor to choose the decathlon as their sport of choice. After an entire day of sprinting, running, long jump, shot put and high jump competitions, athletes have to roll right on back the next day to run hurdles, throw discus, do pole vault, throw javelins and, oh yes, partake in more running.

Keep an eye on Harrison Williams, a 6-foot-5-inch Stanford graduate who’s competing in his first Olympics. He spent his entire time at Stanford breaking the university’s decathlon records, so fingers crossed he can perform similar feats in Paris.

Discus

Technically, he’s on Team Lithuania, but Mykolas Alekna will be repping UC Berkeley at the 2024 Games, too. The psychology student is already a well-known athlete in his home country, but his profile is rising across the U.S. because of the low-key manner in which he keeps performing extraordinary feats.

In April, Alekna broke the oldest world record in track and field when he threw the discus nearly 244 feet. Needless to say, Alekna’s gold prospects are pretty solid — especially when you consider that his dad, Virgilijus Alekna, won gold medals for discus throwing at both the Sydney 2000 and Athens 2004 Olympics.

Fencing

Like Mykolas Alekna, Alexander Massialas had some sizable shoes to fill — his father, Greg, was on the American fencing teams that competed in the 1984 and 1988 Olympic Games. Also like Alekna, Massialas — born and raised in San Francisco — is not struggling to keep up with his talented pop. The Stanford University graduate is already in possession of three Olympic medals — a silver he won in 2016 and two bronzes he earned as part of the men’s fencing team in 2016 and 2021.

One of Massialas’ most notable teammates from those last two games is Gerek Meinhardt, who, in 2008, became the youngest athlete to ever compete on a U.S. Olympic fencing team. Raised in San Francisco, Meinhardt found his love of fencing early in life and via a family friend who coached the sport. That coach? None other than Greg Massialas.

Gymnastics

Stanford University sophomore Asher Hong is heading to Paris in search of gold this month, having placed first on rings in the Olympic trials. And it’s no wonder — head to Hong’s Instagram page to see some of his truly astonishing physical feats. The 20-year-old will be accompanied by fellow Stanford gymnast Khoi Young who’ll be acting as an alternate for the U.S. team.

Hammer Throwing

UC Berkeley graduate Camryn Rogers will be spinning at high speeds and hurling hammers with her trademark strength and precision for Team Canada. You’ll want to root for her anyway — Rogers is the reigning world champion, has a day job working as a special education advocate, and considers her fellow Cal athletes as a second family. The San Francisco Chronicle once called her “the Stephen Curry of her sport — dominant and engaging and likable.” Rogers is someone you can’t help but cheer for.

Kiteboarding

For those wondering if there’s a more peculiar Olympic activity than hammer throwing, the answer to that might be kiteboarding. After all, this sport involves humans strapping small boards to their feet, large sails to their bodies, and then throwing themselves at bodies of water. One of those humans is Daniela Moroz from Lafayette, a six-time Formula Kite World Champion who won her first at the age of 15. This is the first year that kiteboarding has been included in the Olympics, and Moroz is thrilled to face the new level of competition. “I am ready for the challenge,” she recently stated on her website, “and I can’t wait to experience everything that will happen along the way.”

Long Jump

Born and raised in the East Bay, Malcolm Clemons — a current student at the University of Florida in Gainesville — can’t believe how far he’s come. In a recent Instagram post, the long jumper wrote: “From a kid with big dreams in East Oakland, California to an Olympian — what a journey. I thank God for everything. Thank you to my family for all the love and support and to everyone in my village who believed in me.”

Marathon

Long-distance runner Fiona O’Keeffe hails from Davis, graduated from Stanford, and qualified for this year’s Olympics in record time. The fact that the Olympic trial was her first ever professionally run marathon? No biggie, apparently. “There was some level of fear of the unknown,” O’Keeffe told NBC. “But I was really excited to just go run the marathon and see what I could do.”

When O’Keefe crossed the finish line bleeding through her track top, she took it with characteristic stoicism. “Yes, the red stuff on my bib was blood,” she later explained on Instagram. “[I] made the rookie move of stashing a gel in my sports bra and proceeding to drench myself with water on the course, resulting in a little chafing situation.”

Rowing

Ben Davison has been based in Oakland since 2019 and trains with the California Rowing Club. This will be his second Olympic competition, having competed in the U.S. Men’s 8+ in Tokyo in 2021. He’ll be cheered on by the many rowers he trains as an assistant coach at the Oakland Strokes rowing club.

Another Oakland-based rower heading to Paris is Sorin Koszyk who last year won the men’s championship singles race in record time. Koszyk’s U.S. Rowing profile says, “Sorin enjoys spending time with friends and Jenga.” Someone had better have a tower lined up for him at the end of this.

Skiff

If you’re not a boaty person, you might not yet know what a skiff is. Technically, skiffs are any small, open, flat-bottomed sailboats. In the Olympics, the Men’s and Women’s Skiff category describes humans operating in pairs, hanging off the side of skiffs, going at ludicrously high speeds while operating a series of wires and pulleys. Skiff looks extremely challenging, but try telling that to San Francisco’s Hans Henken, who’s competing in the Olympics for the very first time. He and teammate Ian Barrows are currently ranked second in the world and are clearly not to be trifled with — especially when you consider Henken has a master’s degree from Stanford in aeronautical and astronautical engineering. That should help move things along quite nicely.

Skateboarding

Hailing from Petaluma, 18-year-old daredevil Minna Stess has been throwing herself down unfeasibly giant ramps her whole life. (Literally — she started skating as a toddler.) Egged on by a supportive family who built a mini skatepark in their backyard for her to practice on, Stess has been sponsored by the likes of Vans, Independent Trucks and Santa Cruz Skateboards since she was a pre-teen. “I’ve always been competitive,” she told Teen Vogue earlier this year. “But I never thought the Olympics would be something that I could be doing. It’s kind of crazy that this is all happening now.”

Also repping the Bay from his skateboard is Nyjah Huston, originally from Davis. Like Stess, Huston was a skateboarding child prodigy, on the X Games circuit by age 11, and now in possession of 13 gold medals from competing in them. He’s also earned six world championship trophies. Huston has long tried to use his platform for good. In 2010, he started a nonprofit called Let It Flow with the hopes of getting clean water to communities in need all over the world.

Soccer

Menlo Park’s Tierna Davidson and San José’s Naomi Girma will both be showing off their fancy footwork on the Parisian pitch this summer. Davidson has played for Stanford, won a bronze medal in Tokyo in 2021, and is the youngest on the women’s Olympic soccer team. (She should be used to that by now — she was also the youngest person on the 2019 World Cup women’s team.)

Girma, another Stanford graduate, is known as a team player in every sense of the word. She credits her Ethiopian parents — who moved to the U.S. in the early 1980s — with instilling in her strong values and a generous spirit. “Their sacrifices are the only reason I am where I am today,” she recently told NBC Sports. Girma was declared player of the year by the U.S. Women’s National Soccer Team last year because, yes, she’s just that good.

Swimming

The Bay has a healthy number of swimmers at the Paris Olympics this year, but Stanford graduate Katie Ledecky is undoubtedly the most intimidating. Ledecky has already earned seven Olympic gold medals and another 21 world championship golds. Can anyone beat that? We’re about to find out.

UC Berkeley graduates Abbey Weitzel and Ryan Murphy will also be swimming in Paris. Weitzel earned two medals (one gold, one silver) at the Rio Olympics in 2016 and another two in Tokyo in 2021 (one silver, one bronze). Murphy has four Olympic golds to his name and, back in 2009, broke a backstroke world record. None of it has gone to his head, though. After marrying his college sweetheart in 2023, Murphy credited his new wife with much of his success. “I think she’s someone who definitely gets me just motivated about life,” Murphy told People magazine. “She’s super optimistic, and I think that’s just been really helpful for me in terms of my approach to the sport.”

Evgenii Somov, who was born in St. Petersburg, Russia, and moved to Oakland in 2022 after swimming for the University of Louisville, will compete in Paris as an “Individual Neutral Athlete” in the 100-meter breaststroke. Since Russian (and Belarussian) athletes were banned from this year’s Olympics due to the war in Ukraine, Somov has improbably qualified and will race without any state support. Parents of swimmers he’s coached in the Bay Area launched a GoFundMe to help pay for Somov’s expenses, which include his flights and high-tech swimwear. “It comes down to, I either want to go, or I don’t want to go,” he told the San Francisco Chronicle about his drive to compete. “And I want to go.”

Table Tennis

Redwood City’s Lily Zhang started her table tennis career as the youngest female on the U.S. women’s team. She was just 12 years old at the time. Zhang, a former UC Berkeley student, was the youngest member of the U.S. team to compete in 2012’s London Olympics and also took part in the 2021 Tokyo Games. She can undoubtedly provide some inspiration to San José’s Rachel Sung, who is heading to the Olympics for the very first time.

Kanak Jha from Milpitas — who was the U.S. national champion four years in a row (2016–2019) — is also heading to the Olympics, followed by a small cloud of controversy. Jha got hit with a one-year suspension in 2023 for failing three drug tests within 12 months. 2024 will not be Jha’s first Olympics, though. He also competed in 2016 and 2021.

Taekwondo

The tale of Carl “CJ” Nickolas’ athletic career is a heartwarming one of family togetherness. Born in Oakland, Nickolas started taekwondo at the age of 3 at the same time his mom Denise took up the sport. Denise’s achievements were impressive — at 43 years old, the fourth-degree black belt won a national championship. That, and her work ethic in general, has provided Nickolas with nonstop inspiration since he was a kid.

“That’s where I learned about hard work,” he told the Marin Independent Journal earlier this year. “I wanted to work harder than her.”

Nickolas’ prospects at the Olympics are pretty good. He’s currently ranked number two in his weight class and entering the games focused and confident — just like his mom.

Water Polo

The Bay Area has a ridiculous amount of female talent in the water polo category this year. There’s Jewel Roemer, who hails from Martinez and competes for Stanford. There are former Stanford students Jordan Raney, Ryann Neushul and Ella Woodhead (who was born and raised in San Anselmo) — all impressive competitors. There’s also San José’s Jenna Flynn, who earned first place in the 2024 World Aquatics Championships and the 2023 Pan American Games.

Best of all, Maggie Steffens — yet another Stanford graduate — is heading back to the Olympics with the goal of winning her fourth gold medal. Originally from San Ramon and now living in Danville, Steffens has been a top goal scorer in each of the last three Olympics. What’s more, the team captain has long been a beacon for women’s water polo. One so bright, in fact, she inspired Flavor Flav to step up as the official hype man of U.S. women’s water polo. Back in May, Flav publicly pledged to sponsor Steffens and the whole team, stating on X: “The US Women’s Waterpolo team has won the GOLD MEDAL THREE OLYMPICS IN A ROW,,, these women should not have to be working 2-3 side jobs to be able to compete.”

Amen to that, Flav.

If you’re wondering where the men are, adorable San Anselmo brothers Quinn and Dylan Woodhead are both heading to Paris, too. “When you can compete with someone out of a place of love and trust,” Dylan recently told NBC Bay Area, “it’s really easy.” Awww.

Wrestling

The Bay is represented by a major contender in women’s wrestling this summer. Born in Walnut Creek, Amit Elor has been wrestling since the age of 9 and wins gold medals seemingly everywhere she goes. In 2023 alone, Elor took gold at the World Championships, the Pan American Championships, the U23 World Championships and the Junior World Championships. Oh, and she won gold in three out of four of those competitions the year before as well. No reason why she won’t do the same in Paris.

---

The Paris Olympics will be broadcast by NBC and Peacock between July 26 and Aug. 11. Check NBC’s schedule for details.