Five athletes represented NC State and their respective countries at the 2016 Olympics in Rio de Janeiro, highlighted by swimmer Ryan Held winning gold in the 4×100 freestyle relay.
Junior Ryan Held (USA), recent graduate Simonas Bilis (Lithuania), senior Soren Dahl (Denmark) and junior Anton Ipsen (Denmark) represented the Wolfpack men’s swimming and diving team, while Lucas Kozeniesky (USA) from the NC State rifle team competed in the 10m air rifle event.
Ryan Held, who many experts didn’t consider a candidate to make the U.S. swimming and diving Olympic team just a few months ago, earned a spot on the American 4×100 freestyle relay team by finishing third in the individual event at the U.S. Olympic Trials, just three-hundredths of a second behind second place.
Held swam the third leg on the gold-medal winning relay team alongside Caeleb Dressel, eight-time Olympic medalist Nathan Adrian and 28-time Olympic medalist (23 golds) Michael Phelps. Held was given roughly a one-second lead on the next closest team, France, by Dressel and Phelps, and went on to swim a split of 47.73 seconds to keep the lead, which Adrian finished to win the gold.
Bilis swam in multiple events in Rio, including the 100m freestyle and 4×100 medley relay, but his greatest success came in the 50m freestyle in which he qualified for the final. He was the only collegiate swimmer to make the final and finished in eighth place with a time of 22.08 seconds.
Bilis finished 30th overall in the 100m freestyle with a time of 49.16 seconds and 14th on the Lithuanian 4x100m medley relay team with a time of 3:35.90.
Senior air rifle shooter Lucas Kozeniesky just missed out on the finals of the 10m air rifle event by three points, finishing in 21st place with a total score of 622.3. Despite not qualifying for the finals, Kozeniesky was impressive as he was the top-finishing American in the event, beating out teammate Dan Lowe by 2.3 points.
Dahl competed in one event at the Olympics, the 4x200m freestyle relay for his home country of Denmark. The team finished 12th overall with a time of 7:12.66, led by Dahl who posted the best split of his career, 1:47.43.
Ipsen finished 20th in the 400m freestyle, posting a personal-best time of 3:48.31, and 18th in the 1,500m freestyle with a time of 15:05.91, a personal best and good enough to win his heat.
Lucas Kozeniesky, a junior studying sport management and member of the NC State rifle team practices in Broughton Hall on Oct. 20. Kozeniesky has led the team in both the air rifle and small-bore disciplines every year of his career and broke the program record last year for aggregate total score with a tally of 1,173. He also matched the school record in air rifle three times.
