The Badger State’s contributors to Team U.S.A. are recounted in Going for Wisconsin Gold. Longtime local sports reporter Jessie Garcia begins with track and field’s Alvin Kraenzlein, who set records while winning four gold medals at the 1900 Paris Olympics. Garcia finds a few little-known stories, including track and field star Lloyd LaBeach, a Jamaican attending the University of Wisconsin on an athletic scholarship who took two bronzes in the 1948 London games. Most of Going for Wisconsin Gold is devoted to athletes in living memory, post-1960s competitors such as speed skaters Eric Heiden, Dan Jansen and Bonnie Blair, hockey players Mark Johnson and Bob Suter plus Ben Sheets, the first American to win Olympic gold in America’s national pastime, baseball.
