National records, NCAA titles and world championship finals, from athletes you can find on a college roster.
By RallyFuel Team
Turn on the Commonwealth Games this week and you’ll see a lot of flags you don’t recognize. Fiji. St. Vincent and the Grenadines. Bermuda. Jersey. Niue.
Look at the athletes under those flags, though, and the résumés get very familiar very fast. Texas. UCLA. Arizona State. Auburn. Arkansas.
The Games run in Glasgow from 23 July to 2 August, with swimming at Tollcross and track and field at Scotstoun. Ten sports, roughly 3,000 athletes, 74 nations and territories. And a meaningful share of the field learned to compete on an American college campus.
The names in Glasgow
Kayinsola Ajayi, Auburn, running for Nigeria. Twenty one years old, from Ikorodu. This year alone he swept both NCAA sprint titles: the 60m indoors, where he equalled Christian Coleman’s collegiate record at 6.45, and the 100m outdoors, becoming only the second Nigerian ever to win it. He set a Nigerian record of 9.84, then ran it twice more on the professional circuit, beating the reigning world champion at both the Prefontaine Classic and the London Diamond League. Last September he made the world championship final in Tokyo, the first Nigerian to do it since 2007.
Eva Okaro, Texas, swimming for England. Nineteen, a Paris Olympian before she ever enrolled, and she owns the Longhorns’ school record in the 100 free after one season. She took SEC silvers in the 50 and the 100.
Tolu Young, Arizona State, swimming for Fiji. He finished 12th at NCAAs last season. In Glasgow he qualified sixth for the 50 free final, the first swimming final Fiji has ever reached at a Commonwealth Games. A country of under a million people got there because one of its swimmers trains in Tempe.
Tiana Sumanasekera, UCLA, competing for Sri Lanka. Part of the Bruins’ 2026 Big Ten title team and fifth at the NCAA Championships.
And it goes deeper than the headliners. Auburn’s track roster also includes Asande Mthembu, a jumper from Pretoria, and Ibukunoluwa Daramola, a freshman jumper from Nigeria. Both South Africa and Nigeria compete at these Games. One track program, three athletes eligible.
Arkansas alone sent six former athletes to Glasgow representing four countries: Jerome Campbell and Romaine Beckford and Nia Robinson for Jamaica, Shafiqua Maloney for St. Vincent, Amber Anning for England, and Jah-Nhai Perinchief for Bermuda. Anning won two relay bronzes in Paris. Every one of them came through the same program, and the athletes filling those lanes in Fayetteville right now are the next group.
The spotlight problem
College sports attention runs on a familiar shape. Football fills a hundred thousand seats. Basketball owns March. Everything else competes for what’s left of the oxygen.
That is not anyone’s fault, it is simply how audiences and broadcast schedules have always worked. But it produces an odd result. The athletes above hold national records, win NCAA titles and represent whole countries at global championships, and outside their own sport most fans have never heard of them.
Swimming finals happen at nine in the morning. Track meets run on a Thursday. A gymnastics beam routine that took fifteen years to build lasts ninety seconds and then the broadcast moves on.
The performances are elite. The visibility just isn’t proportional.
Why fan support fits Olympic sports so well
This is the case for a platform like RallyFuel, and it is at its strongest right here.
Small amounts do real work. In the highest profile sports, the numbers that make headlines are enormous. In swimming or track, the gap between a good season and a great one is often much more ordinary: travel to a meet, an extra recovery week, better equipment, not needing a summer job. Support at a modest scale genuinely changes what an athlete can do.
The fanbases are smaller but far more invested. Nobody follows college gymnastics casually. The people watching a 50 free final before breakfast are as committed as any football crowd. Give that audience a direct way to back someone and they will use it. What has been missing is the mechanism, not the enthusiasm.
The athletes are findable now. Every athlete linked above has a page. You can search by school, by sport, by conference, and back a specific person by name rather than sending money into a general pool and hoping some of it reaches the people you actually watch. RallyFuel already did this at scale for Milano Cortina, tracking 68 college athletes through the Winter Games with a medal tracker attached. Glasgow is the same idea in a summer sport.
Watch Glasgow, then look them up
Track and field runs at Scotstoun through the closing ceremony on 2 August. Swimming wraps at Tollcross this week.
When you see a name under a flag you did not expect, check where they train. There is a decent chance the answer is a campus you know, in a conference you follow, on a roster you could support today.
Fiji’s first swimming final came out of Arizona State. Nigeria’s fastest man runs in the SEC. Six Razorbacks are competing under four different flags.
They earned the stage. Backing them is the easy part.
