Ben Percival '18 competes in Olympic Games

Frank de Wit of the Netherlands and Peniamina Percival of Samoa competing on Men -81 kg Elimination Round of 32 during the Tokyo 2020 Olympic Games at the Nippon Budokan on July 27, 2021 in Tokyo, JapanPhoto/Getty Images

Peniamina "Ben" Percival, right, competing in the 81 kg elimination round of 32 during the Tokyo 2020 Olympic Games at the Nippon Budokan on July 27, 2021 in Tokyo, Japan.

Peniamina "Ben" Percival ’18 became the second Brandeis graduate to compete in the Olympic Games on Tuesday.

Percival represented his home country of Samoa in Judo, bowing out in his first match in the 81-kilogram weight class to Frank de Wit of Holland, one of the world's top judo competitors. Percival was pinned 69 seconds into the match, scoring an "ippon" for de Wit, ending the match with 2:51 on the clock.

Percival, 26, took up the sport at 13 and started training more seriously while studying abroad in Japan in 2016, where he was awarded his first black belt, according to his Olympics bio. He finished 65th at the World Championships in 2019, and his best performance was a 7th-ranked finished at a World Cup event in Hong Kong in 2019.

He is joined in Tokyo for the Summer Games by his brother, Iosefa Percival ’16, who served as his Olympic coach. By competing in the games, Percival joined fencer Tim Morehouse '00 as the only Brandeis alumni to compete in the Olympics. Morehouse won a silver medal at the 2008 Olympics in Beijing.

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Categories: Alumni, Athletics

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