Donald Spero
| Personal information | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Born |
August 8, 1939 Chicago, United States |
|||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Height | 1.88 m (6 ft 2 in) | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Weight | 86 kg (190 lb) | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Sport | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Sport | Rowing | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Club | NYAC, New York | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||
|
Medal record
|
||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Donald M. "Don" Spero (born August 9, 1939) is an American physicist, venture capitalist and a former U.S. and world champion rower who competed at the 1964 Summer Olympics and won the single sculls 1966 World Rowing Championships.
Spero was born in Chicago, Illinois, in the United States, and is Jewish. He received his degree in Engineering Physics from Cornell University, where he was a member of the Quill and Dagger society. He received a Ph.D. in Physics from Columbia University. Spero rowed for New York Athletic Club.
As a freshman at Cornell University in 1957, Spero was unaware of the competitive sport of rowing. He was in the Cornell freshman eight that won the 1958 Intercollegiate Rowing Association (IRA) Championship under coach Carl Ullrich. During his next three years on the varsity squad under the fabled Cornell coach R. H. (Stork) Sanford, Spero was a member of two more championship crews.
His first international competition came at the World 1961 Maccabiah Games, when he won a gold medal in the coxed four, along with coxswain and coach Allen Rosenberg.
He took up sculling in 1963, winning the U.S. National Championships in single sculls against the former national champion Seymour Cromwell. Together he and Cromwell won the 1963 U.S. National Championship in double sculls, and went on to bring the U.S. a silver medal in the European Rowing Championships in Copenhagen. In 1964 Spero joined the New York Athletic Club [1] and won his second U.S. Single Sculls Championship. He then represented the United States at the 1964 Summer Olympics at Tokyo in the single sculls. Spero defeated the reigning Olympic champion V. Ivanov of the U.S.S.R in the preliminary heats, advancing to the finals and finishing sixth. Also in 1964, he won a bronze medal in the single sculls at the European Championships in Amsterdam.
...
Wikipedia