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. 

Last month we went to The Championships as they are called. It was quite an experience, as you’d expect. The one thing I noticed is that many of the players socks come up fairly high on their ankles. We were watching Lukas Rosol on a side-court in his first-round match. This was the one before he knocked out Nadal and the only reason we stoppe was that we saw that his socks came up exactly to a spot right below where his massive Maori-inspired tattoo on his left calf was. 

Have you noticed that many of us amateurs are wearing their socks very very low? In golf, tennis, lawn-mowing? Even indoors, in squash, when no one is working on a tan, many guys have socks that barely get above their sneakers. Some are officially “no-show” socks. Twenty or thirty years ago, a low sock would have been a sight seen only on women’s ankles, and we had these high tube socks.

Wonder what turned the tide, as it were, on the socks?