Rutgers Alumna a Teen Olympian
Douglass College alumna Sue Pitt Anderson was a member of two Olympic swim teams prior to enrolling at Rutgers
When Sue Pitt Anderson made the 1964 Olympic team and traveled to Tokyo to compete, she was a 16-year-old who didn’t enjoy the adulation that went with her remarkable accomplishment when she returned to her New Jersey high school.
“They had an assembly for me, and I was mortified—absolutely mortified—because I did not want to be up on the stage with this big deal being made about me,” says Anderson, now a resident of Milwaukee, Wisconsin, who also was included in a feature in LIFE magazine. “I just wanted to go back to school and be my normal high school-student self.”
Anderson was a member of the gold-medal winning U.S. women’s swim team in the Tokyo 1964 Olympics, swimming in the preliminary heats of the 4X100-meter medley relay. But there was no gold medal for her. Unlike today’s international swimming rules, 1964’s rules allowed for medals only for those who swam in the event final.
“I would have loved a medal, but I understood the rules at the time,” she says.
Once out of high school, Anderson stopped swimming completely, leaving two world records and several national championships in her wake.
When it came time for college, her quest for anonymity led her to initially choose the University of Vermont, despite her family history with Rutgers University. Her father, Larry Pitt, was third-generation Rutgers and inductee into the Rutgers Athletics Hall of Fame as a special contributor to Rutgers Athletics who served at Rutgers in administrative positions and as education professor.
“I never missed a Rutgers football game from the day I was born until I was a freshman in high school,” she says.
As a college student, Anderson was watching some old friends who were still swimming, and she was surprised to see their times hadn’t improved. Though it’d been a year since she swam, thoughts of swimming in the 1968 Olympics in Mexico began floating in her mind. In January 1968, she dropped out of the University of Vermont to prepare for the Olympic trials.
“I came back to New Jersey to train with Frank Elm, who had always been my coach and coached not only the Rutgers varsity, but also a successful club team, Scarlet Jets, which is who I swam for,” she says. “I didn't do as well in the ’68 Olympic trials as I hoped, but it was good enough to make the 1968 team as an alternate.”
She traveled to Mexico City, but unfortunately the head coach chose not to use the alternates, so she did not get to compete.
Enrolling at Rutgers after the Mexico City Olympics, Anderson earned a degree in political science from Douglass College in 1973, which opened many windows to parts of the world that most teenagers of her generation were not privy to. Beyond Tokyo, she competed all over Europe and in the former Soviet Union, and then traveled to Tunisia to work in the Peace Corps as a swim coach.
After a career in swimming and coaching, which included founding the Scarlet Aquatics Club that trains at Rutgers, as well as serving as director of programs and services at USA Swimming, she is now enjoying her time in Milwaukee as “a retired lady and grandmother and somewhat of a political activist.”
She’s also a proud Rutgers alumnus.
“I am glad I ended up going to Rutgers,” she says.” People out here know Rutgers in the Big Ten, but it's still kind of exotic out here to be a Rutgers graduate. And I'm proud of being a Rutgers alumnus and for what the school gave to me.”
For more about Sue Pitt Anderson and her Rutgers and Olympic experiences, check out an interview she conducted in 2022 with the Rutgers Oral History Archives.
WE ARE YOU is an ongoing series of stories about the people who embody Rutgers University’s unwavering commitment to academic excellence, building community, and the common good.
