BY WALTER ELLIOTT
NEWARK – Newark’s Bam Adebayo and Montclair’s Jesse Grupper are among the 1,800 USOC athletes who will be competing in the Paris Summer Olympic Games.
Adebeyo, who is on the men’s basketball team and fencer Grupper are the latest of “Local Talk” town athletes whose paths led them to a summer or winter Olympics. Newark boxer Shakur Stevenson and Maplewood fencer Ibtihaj Muhammad are two of the latest local examples.
Those are the two who qualified for the US Olympic team. There may be athletes who were born, resided or gone to school here who may be on another Olympic team.
The International Olympic Committee allows members’ National Olympic Committee to allow athletes who were born in another country. The 206 national teams bound for Paris include Puerto Rico, the US Virgin Islands – plus an International Refugee team.
There also may or may not be “Local Talk” area hometowners among the US Paralympic team. The Paralympic will be using the same Parisian venues after the Olympic flame is extinguished.
Adebayo and Grupper’s paths to this summer’s games are a study in comparison and contrast.
Edrice Femi “Bam” Adebayo, who was born in Newark July 18, 1997, may be best known for playing for the NBA’s Miami Heat. He was on the US team that won a gold medal in the 2020 (actually 2021-the pandemic) Games at Tokyo.
Adebeyo’s formal basketball path may have well started when his mother moved the family to Pinetown, NC in 2004. He was a scholar-athlete at Pinetown’s Northside High School and High Point Christian Academy.
He played for the University of Kentucky Wildcats in 2016-17 before he entered the 2017 NBA draft. He was selected by the Miami Heat – where he continues to play, and recently signed a lucrative contract extension.
Those who have not been paying attention to the US Olympic Men’s Basketball Team should be reminded that some national Olympic basketball teams are allowed to have professional players on board since 1992. Some may recall the 1992 USOC “Dream Team” that won gold in the Barcelona Olympics.
Grupper is also considered a professional athlete – in sport climbing. The IOC added sport climbing for the 2020 Tokyo Games, where another US athlete won the gold.
The IOC periodically considers adding sports at the behest of the host country for demonstration – like flag football for the 2028 Games at Los Angeles. Sometimes the IOC drops a sport – which had recently happened to baseball.
Grupper, who was born Jan. 6, 1997, turned pro after winning in the 2023 Pan-American Games in Santiago, Chile. His path was more of the traditional Olympic amateur, working a full-time job around training.
While some of his USOC colleagues had worked as box hardware store clerks, Grupper, until recently, was a research fellow at Harvard University’s Biodesign Lab. He had been designing exoskeletons for stroke victims.
The boy who started indoor climbing at the age of six earned a mechanical engineering degree from Tufts University in 2019. He meanwhile made the national open team five times and the national team 10 times.
