Fred Thompson’s vision has been more than realized. It has been life-altering. In 1974, the Boys High School (now Boys and Girls High School), City College of New York, and St. John’s University School of Law graduates founded the Colgate Women’s Games with Pratt Institute being its first home.
As the nation’s longest-running track & field Series for girls and women prepares for its 50th staging under the leadership of meet director Cheryl Toussaint, the legacy of Thompson, who passed away in 2019 at the age of 85 from complications of Alzheimer’s disease, is globally expansive.
“…The place is filled with mommies and daddies,” Thompson said to the New York Times in 1979 regarding the Games at Pratt. “I know guys who never get out of bed on a Sunday for anything else, but they were there to see their daughter run.”
With its decades-long support from consumer products company Colgate-Palmolive, the first Colgate Games finals were held in 1975 at Madison Square Garden. This year, The Nike Track & Field Center at the Armory in the Washington Heights section of Upper Manhattan, one of the most sparkling track and field facilities in the country, will host the numerous young ladies and women of varying ages that will continue a tradition that has seen a plethora of all-time great runners such as Toussaint, Diane Dixon, Ann Vazquez, Dalilah Muhammad, Natasha Hastings, and Nia Ali to name a few claim Colgate championships.
Preliminary meets will begin on December 28 and continue on January 4, followed by the semifinals on January 18, and culminating with the finals on February 7. The meet is free to participate and attend, welcoming all girls in grades one and above who are enrolled in and attending school; in addition to women in college and those still competing after college. Registration is still open and this Saturday, the Student Union on the campus of Pratt Institute in Brooklyn will be the site for in-person registration from 9 a.m. to 3 p.m.
What Thompson has built and Toussaint has masterfully curated is emblematic of their love of track and field and reflective of their journey of excellence. Thompson, an assistant Attorney General of New York State from 1967 to 1969, by then, was well into guiding the Atoms Track Club, which he founded in 1963, run out of a community center in Bedford-Stuyvesant, Brooklyn. In 1988 he was a coach for the United States Olympic team.
Toussaint, a Brooklyn native and graduate of Erasmus Hall, honed her skills in the Colgate Games ahead of winning a silver medal at the 1972 Olympics in Munich, Germany, as a member of the United States’ women’s 4 x 400 meter relay team.