STARKVILLE, Miss. ( WJTV ) – Mississippi State University (MSU) will send its largest delegation in school history to the 2024 Paris Olympic Games. The university will be represented by nine athletes and one coach.

The athletes will represent eight countries in four different sports beginning on July 25, a day before the Opening Ceremony.

Five Bulldogs are making their second Olympic appearance. Marco Arop (CAN), Anderson Peters (GRN) and Curtis Thompson (USA) all competed in track and field at the Tokyo Games. MSU head track and field coach Chris Woods was an assistant coach that year for Canada, guiding Arop, and will reprise that role in 2024. Catalina Perez (COL) will make her second Games after being selected to Colombia’s soccer roster for the Rio 2016 Games before she enrolled at MSU.

Making their first Olympic teams are Navasky Anderson (JAM) and Lee Eppie (BOT) in track and field, Ilana Izquierdo (COL) in soccer, Ahlana Smith (PUR) in basketball and Nuno Borges (POR) in tennis. Borges, Izquierdo, Perez and Smith are the first Bulldog Olympians in their respective sports, and Izquierdo will be the 11th athlete to compete in an Olympics while still an active student-athlete at MSU.

Izquierdo and Perez will open the Games for Team MSU on July 25 with the group stage of the Olympic soccer tournament. Borges gets underway on July 27 and is expected to compete in both the men’s singles and men’s doubles brackets. Smith and the Puerto Rican women’s basketball team open pool play on July 28. Track and field competition will begin on Aug. 1, but the Bulldogs’ events do not begin until Aug. 6 when Peters and Thompson begin the men’s javelin competition. Anderson and Arop begin the men’s 800m on Aug. 7, and Botswana’s 4x400m relay team with Eppie will run its first race on Aug. 9.

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