UW-Madison’s Kimberly Santiago: An Internationalist at Heart
Kimberly Santiago is the communications and advancement manager for UW-Madison’s College of Agriculture and Life Sciences
Part 1 of 2
By Jonathan Gramling
In some ways, Kimberly “Kim” Santiago was born an internationalist. Her Filipino father was a doctor who came to Chicago where he met and married Santiago’s mother. When Santiago was five, her father was recruited to be a doctor in Monroe Wisconsin.
“There were all of these Filipino doctors who went to these small communities across the state,” Santiago said. “There was a doctor in Monroe. There was a doctor in New Glarus. There were doctors all around the state of Wisconsin. There were doctors from India and Taiwan again because of the English.”
Santiago lived there until she was 18 and a high school student. For the vast majority of her time in Monroe, they were the only Asian family.
“It was the 1960s,” Santiago recalled. “It was unique. They still spoke Sweitzer Deutsch. On Saturdays, they would dress up in their lederhosen and go to the Turner Hall and have their dance and fish fry. They still held tight to a lot of those traditions. It was very different. We moved there when I was in kindergarten. Sometimes I would ask my mom what certain words meant that I had never heard before. They were all derogatory,
not very nice words. We might have been the first Asian family in Monroe. I think shortly after that, a family came from Taiwan. We ate rice, which was weird to them. My dad cooked with garlic. People would come into the house and they would get this smell…”
Santiago’s parents separated and then divorced with Santiago living with her mother in Madison and she attended and graduated from Madison Memorial. Santiago went on to UW-Madison where she studied international relations in hope of having a career with the diplomatic corps. But the diplomatic corps was considered by some to be a man’s world.
“To be honest, the advisor in that major at that time was not very encouraging to women,” Santiago said. “He was discouraging women from entering that major. He was very encouraging to men. That was what I wanted to major in and that was my interest.”
Santiago ended up putting a lot of her passion and interest into another field of endeavor that eventually allowed her to enter the international field of sorts. She pursued rowing while maintaining her academic standing at UW-Madison. And she went on to compete in the 1988 and 1992 Olympics after graduating from UW-Madison.
It wasn’t easy making the Olympic team. And that had nothing to do with the level of competition. It had everything to do with the gauntlet of hardship that one had to pass through in order to compete in the Olympics. You were basically on your own.
“I did many ridiculous jobs when I was in training,” Santiago recalled. “At that time, rowing wasn’t track and field or basketball. We weren’t a highly funded sport. Things have changed now. But at that time, you were self-supporting. And you pretty much lived 3-4 people in a 1-2 bedroom apartment. We had all sorts of creative ways to just to pay the bills. The other thing with training was that every summer, in order to be considered for the U.S. team, you had to compete in certain races, which meant you had to get there. You had to get on the team. If you were selected into the training camp and selection camp, that was July and August. Selection was in August. And then the World Championships were in the end of August and beginning of September. So for three months, you were not working. Wherever your home was, you were not there because you were training. And so you had to have a job that allowed you to be gone for three months. You had to have a lot of flexibility. A lot of the rowers were self-supporting, either they had their own moving company or did carpentry or worked in the trades. I worked at Harvard. And the academic calendar allowed me to take off for the summer and come back in the fall. We were actually training out of their facility. That helped.”
In many ways, rowing was a stepchild in U.S. Olympic sports. And the U.S. team was lucky that it had a fairy godmother of sorts who did what she could to make their path easier.
“The U.S. Olympic Committee didn’t supply us with any equipment,” Santiago said. “We were able to train out of Harvard because prior to us being there, the former coach of the Harvard rowing team was Terry Grace who just passed away. She was a rower here at Wisconsin. She was probably the most well-known women’s rower. She was on three Olympic teams. She was a phenomenal athlete. She had been the coach there. She allowed our club, the Boston Rowing Club, to train out of their facility. But we didn’t have any equipment. So we had to use the worst equipment. They weren’t going us to use their nice equipment. We had this hodge podge, ragtag assortment of equipment that has been much improved since that time. We were kind of bottom of the barrel to use the facility, to have equipment. It was really out of the goodness of their heart that they allowed us to be there.”
The future members of the U.S. Olympic team basically had to rough it until training camp. And even then, the accommodations weren’t top-notch.
“The way that rowing works is that the National Team doesn’t actually exist until the selection for the World Championships,” Santiago said. “Up until that point, you are self-funded pretty much. You train during the fall and in the spring with your rowing club. Then you have to go to these particular races. Then if you are invited to the camps, that is funded by the rowing federation. If you make it onto the team, you are funded.”
And one would think that when Santiago made the U.S. Olympic team, that finally she would be treated as an equal financially. But she wasn’t. She still had to pay part of her way to get to Seoul. However, her father got a free ride to see her compete in Seoul in 1988.
