The Winter Olympics: The Schools That Rule the Games --- Big Ten Powers Fill Olympic Rosters, but Smaller Programs Also Proliferate; Where's Westminster College?
Friday, 26 February 2010 | The Business of Sport
We know which countries produce the most Winter Olympic medals. But which colleges produce the most Olympians?
Just as there are football factories and basketball schools -- universities that excel at churning out linebackers or post players -- so too are there Olympic schools. As in other sports, location and tradition are the main attributes that attract Olympians to a particular college.
Vancouver is lousy with Wisconsin Badgers, Minnesota Golden Gophers and other Big Tenners -- at least 34. Wisconsin has at least a dozen current and former athletes at the Games, and Minnesota another six, because of their powerful ice-hockey programs. Michigan has six too, thanks to first-rate figure-skating coaching nearby.
Dartmouth, whose century-old ski program is believed to be the first of its kind, is well represented as always. The Big Green has at least nine Olympians, including cross-country skier Tucker Murphy, Bermuda's flag bearer. But more than frigid schools are represented.
Bobsledder Chuck Berkeley ran track at California. Rachael Flatt, the 17-year-old American figure skater, has been accepted at Stanford. Some of them were athletes in college but didn't take up their Olympic sport until later. Curt Tomasevicz was a linebacker at Nebraska before joining the U.S. bobsled team.
Westminster College, a private school of roughly 2,000 undergraduates in Salt Lake City (site of the 2002 Games), has 14 students at the Olympics, including moguls bronze medalist Bryon Wilson. The University of Minnesota Duluth has somehow become intertwined with Swedish women's hockey despite being 4,000 miles away. UMD counts six players on Sweden's team.
When it comes to foreign colleges, the University of Calgary is the gold medalist. The school -- which benefits from its proximity to the Olympic Oval, a world-class speed-skating facility -- has at least 20 current or former athletes in this year's Games. Austria's University of Innsbruck, which is near world-class ski slopes and bobsled runs, has at least six Olympians this year.
That's typical for the school, which helps athletes by adjusting classroom requirements and test dates to fit their schedules. But the school doesn't usually promote its Olympic credentials. "We can't keep track of just the athletes," says Uwe Steger, a university spokesman.
Although the Summer Olympics has arguably been more associated with college -- Jesse Owens ran track at Ohio State -- some prominent Winter Olympians also went to school.
Figure skater Peggy Fleming, who won gold in 1968, attended Colorado College. Georgia football tailback Herschel Walker pushed a bobsled in 1992.
The tabulations of college Olympians aren't precise. There are some 2,600 athletes in this Olympics, and no one has made a comprehensive study of all of their biographies. The primary source for the numbers was the unverified biographies that the national federations submitted to the Vancouver Organizing Committee. Some schools' totals could be greater, some lower.
The numbers do make broader points. For one, college attendance isn't a must for the winter games. Most events -- like luge and ice dancing -- don't exist at the national collegiate level, so schools often contribute little to athletes' development.
Some athletes feel they can't attend college because of the time their training demands. "I really commend the people that can do both," says former U.S. figure skater Tim Goebel, who won a bronze at the 2002 Salt Lake City Games. While training, he went to school full-time at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland -- an arrangement that lasted all of one semester.
"It was impossible," he says.
College hockey is flush with Olympians, particularly at Minnesota Duluth, a branch of the University of Minnesota system. UMD, which stresses foreign recruiting, has 14 current and former women's hockey players in the Vancouver Games, including the Sweden six and three on Finland's team.
"Stones were thrown initially," UMD coach Shannon Miller says of the reaction to her recruiting foreigner students, which helped the Bulldogs win four national titles between 2001 and 2008. "Then people stopped throwing stones and got on the plane and started recruiting."
As Team Canada's coach at the 1998 Nagano Olympics, she had compiled a bunch of notes on players from other countries. When UMD hired her in 1998, she relied on that knowledge to recruit foreigners to the school's nascent program.
Although other countries didn't (and don't) have nearly as many good players as the U.S. and Canada, there were some worth grabbing. Maria Rooth was UMD's first from Sweden; Erika Holst followed. When they returned home, other players noticed their development -- and started looking at UMD.
Michigan counts four ice dancers in Vancouver, including silver medalists Meryl Davis and Charlie White. "They didn't get mobbed too often before they left," says Michigan senior Emily Hammond, a member of the Michigan Figure Skating Club, "but they will when they get back."
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By Darren Everson and David Biderman, The Wall Street Journal
David Crawford and Ben Cohen contributed to this article
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