After cementing a historic legacy in his time at Cornell, Kyle Dake ’13 made history once again at the Paris 2024 Olympic Games by securing his second bronze medal in the 163 lbs weight category.
On Saturday, Aug. 10, Dake clinched a decisive win against Serbia’s Hetik Cabolov to secure the bronze medal, repeating his placement in the 2020 Tokyo Games. No other wrestler has repeated the same Olympic medal since Buvaisar Saitiev of Russia in the ’04 and ’08 games.
In Dake’s match against Cabolov, he found himself down 4-1 but acted quickly and implemented his patented “Dake bomb” overhead throw for five points, earning an additional point to take the deciding 10-4 lead.
At 33 years old, Dake was the oldest wrestler on Team USA at the Paris 2024 Olympics. Dake — who is also a father of three — told CNBC that he was offered many opportunities to move on from wrestling, including a University head coaching position. But he knew that he wanted to continue to compete at the highest level and ultimately look back knowing he put his all into the sport.
“I don’t wrestle for income, I don’t wrestle because it’s easy,” Dake told CNBC. “I wrestle because it’s something that I want to do.”
Dake is no stranger to setting new records — at Cornell, he became the first NCAA wrestler to win four national championships in four different weight classes — 141 pounds as a freshman, 149 as a sophomore, 157 as a junior and 165 as a senior. He accomplished this without taking a redshirt season — a season where an athlete does not compete to remain eligible for an extra competition season.
Dake was named the Outstanding Wrestler at the NCAA tournament in 2013 after clinching his fourth title.
A sociology major at Cornell, Dake became a co-captain of the Red after his junior season before being named captain for his senior year. He also received accolades nationally, being the only Cornellian to be awarded the Dan Hodge Trophy, an honor granted to the top wrestler in the nation at the collegiate level.
After graduation, he returned to Ithaca to serve as a volunteer assistant coach for the wrestling team in Fall 2013. Dake continued to find success in wrestling, winning the United World Wrestling championships in Budapest, Hungary in 2018.
Dake made Cornell history in 2021 when he qualified for the Olympic wrestling team. Dake was the fifth former Cornellian to compete on the Olympic wrestling team and the first in 57 years.
Dakee won his first Olympic medal in Tokyo, a hard-fought bronze. He was inducted into the Cornell Athletics Hall of Fame in 2023.
Dake’s newest Olympic title solidifies his legacy as one of the most decorated Cornellian athletes of the 21st century and the most decorated wrestler in recent Red history.