The Davenport Gnomes may have won, but their trickery gave Saybrook the trophy.
Davenport tallied the most points in the class of 2014’s Freshman Olympics on Saturday, but the Freshman Class Council disqualified the Gnomes for stealing and breaking the flag of rival residential college Pierson, boosting runner-up Saybrook to victory.
FCC Chair Eric Eliasson ’14 said the captain’s handbook dictates that any team caught stealing a flag will be ejected from the games.
“Unfortunately, it was brought to our attention that Davenport stole Pierson’s flag and it was returned to Pierson broken,” Eliasson told the News in an email Sunday. “Since they not
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only stole the flag, but also broke it, I talked to the FCC members around me at the closing ceremonies and we determined as a whole that we had to DQ Davenport.”
While the incident precluded Davenport from capturing the Freshman Olympics title, many Gnomes saw the day as a double win for their college.
In an email to all of Davenport, YCC representative Kat Lau ’13 congratulated the college’s freshmen for their performance.
“The official record may show that Davenport won first place but was then disqualified for breaking the Pierson College flag,” Lau wrote, “but I’m pretty sure that we can all agree that there is LITERALLY NO WAY TO WIN ANY MORE THAN OWNING EVERYBODY IN OLYMPICS AND HUMILIATING PIERSON AT THE SAME TIME.”
Indeed, the flag-stealing was certainly a coup for Davenport’s Zachary Johnson ’14.
Johnson had acquired a Pierson T-shirt, and he made the most of the enemy clothing. Clad in the rival team’s shirt, he walked up to a group of Pierson students and asked to hold the flag, Davenport captain Andre Morales ’14 said.
When Pierson yielded its banner, Johnson took off. The Pirates could not catch the speedy varsity athlete.
“He’s on the crew team, he’s kind of fast,” Morales said of Johnson. “He actually took it back to his suite … he threw it out of the window to give it back, and it did not make it safely to the ground.”
Morales claimed that the flag-stealing was not unprovoked.
“[Pierson] wrote their own song for the dance-off, and it ended with a classic “F–k Davenport” — that’s really what incited all of the flag-stealing and flag-breaking,” Morales said. “It was extra special to get to steal both their flag and their victory.”
Even Morse captain Steven Mendoza ’14 expressed little sympathy for Pierson who, in addition to losing its flag, also faltered in its recent dominance of the Freshman Olympics with a seventh-place finish Saturday. Pierson’s classes of 2010, 2012 and 2013 have all won the games.
“Shame on Pierson too, not protecting their flag as well as they should have,” Mendoza said.
Davenport racked up the most points among the 12 residential colleges, with a first-place finish in soccer. The Gnomes also earned second in dodgeball, the walk-off and Mario Kart.
Other events in this year’s Freshman Olympics included duck-duck goose, ultimate frisbee, a relay race, volleyball, tug-of-war, Project Runway, a T-shirt competition and a dance-off.
Correction: April 12, 2011
An earlier version of this article incorrectly stated that Davenport won the Wiki race. Saybrook, not Davenport, won the event.