OK, time for our occasional update on the status of the doping re-tests from the 2008 and 2012 Olympics. Our last post on this topic was in April 2017 – see https://olympstats.com/2017/04/03/2008-2012-doping-re-tests-an-update/, while we first posted about his in November 2016, urged on by Roger Pielke, which we appreciated. For that original post see https://olympstats.com/2016/11/28/summary-of-the-ioc-re-testing-from-2008-2012-to-date/. We’ll keep this a little shorter and just summarize more recent findings.

First of all, there has not been much to update since April 2017. At that time we noted that there had been 182 positive PED tests from the 2008 and 2012 Olympics, and as of 22 Sep, there are now 190 positive tests. A few came out in later April 2017 and one in August but not nearly as much activity as 2015-16.

We are including all positive tests that affect 2008-12 Olympic results. This includes positive tests done in pre-Games testing, original testing at the Olympic Games, re-testing of samples done at a later date, and retroactive disqualifications for other positive tests in the peri-Olympic era that were announced later.

Once again, the former Soviet republics make up the bulk of the nations with positive tests. Here are the 11 nations with the most positive tests:

And here is a current summary of the 5 sports most affected in 2008-12:

Finally, the 5 drugs or violations most responsible for positive tests from 2008-12:

Nothing particularly new in any of that.

Now we can look a little bit more at medal re-assignments. We danced around that a bit in the first two posts on the subject, because medal re-assignments are announced slowly (if at all), and are often subject to litigation or arbitration at the Court of Arbitration for Sport (CAS). Witness the case of Nesta Carter, Jamaican sprinter who won a gold medal in 2008 in the 4×100 relay, alongside one Usain Bolt. Carter had a positive re-test that was announced in late 2016, but it is still in arbitration at the CAS and no final decision has been announced, so the medal has not been removed, neither from Carter, nor Bolt, and thus no medal(s) has/have been re-assigned.

But here are the medal re-assignments we do know about:

• 2008 Women’s Athletics 10,000 metres.  Elvan Abeylegesse (TUR) [Silver] disqualified. Advance Shalane Flanagan (USA) to silver, and Linet Masai (KEN) to bronze.
• 2008 Women’s Athletics 4×100 relay.  Russia [Gold] disqualified. Advance Belgium to gold, Nigeria to silver, and Brazil to bronze.
• 2008 Women’s Athletics 4×400 relay.  Russia [Silver] disqualified. Advance Jamaica to silver, and Great Britain to bronze.
• 2008 Women’s Athletics 5,000 metres.  Elvan Abeylegesse (TUR) [Silver] disqualified. Advance Meseret Defar (ETH) to silver, and Sylvia Kibet (KEN) to bronze.
• 2008 Women’s Athletics Discus throw.  Yarelis Barrios (CUB) [Silver] disqualified. Advance Olena Antonova (UKR) to silver and Song Aimin (CHN) to bronze.
• 2008 Women’s Athletics High jump.  Anna Chicherova (RUS) [Bronze] disqualified. Advance Chaunté Lowe (USA) to bronze.
• 2008 Women’s Athletics Hammer throw.  Oksana Menkova (BLR) [Gold] disqualified. Advance Yipsi Moreno (CUB) to gold, and Zhang Wenxiu (CHN) to silver.
• 2008 Women’s Athletics Javelin throw.  Mariya Abakumova (RUS) [Silver] disqualified. Advance Christina Obergföll (GER) to silver.
• 2008 Women’s Athletics Long jump.  Tatyana Lebedeva (RUS) [Silver] disqualified. Advance Blessing Okagbare (NGR) to silver.
• 2008 Women’s Athletics Shot put.  Nataliya Khoroneko (BLR) [Silver] and Nadezhda Ostapchuk (BLR) [Bronze] disqualified. Advance Misleydis González (CUB) to silver, and Gong Lijiao (CHN) to bronze.
• 2008 Women’s Athletics Steeplechase.  Yekaterina Volkova (RUS) [Bronze] disqualified. Advance Tatyana Petrova-Arkhipova (RUS) to bronze.
• 2008 Men’s Athletics 4×400 relay.  Russia [Bronze] disqualified. Advance Great Britain to bronze.
• 2008 Men’s Athletics Pole vault.  Denys Yurchenko (UKR) [Bronze] disqualified. Advance Derek Miles (USA) to bronze.
• 2008 Women’s Modern Pentathlon Individual.  Viktoriya Tereshchuk (UKR) [Bronze] disqualified. Advance Anastasiya Samusevich (BLR) to bronze.
• 2008 Women’s Weightlifting +75 kg.  Olha Korobka (UKR) [Silver] and Mariya Grabovetskaya (KAZ) [Bronze] disqualified. Advance Ele Opeloge (SAM) to silver, and Maryam Usman (NGR) to bronze.
• 2008 Women’s Weightlifting 48 kg.  Chen Xiexia (CHN) [Gold] and Sibel Özkan (TUR) [Silver] disqualified. Advance Chen Wei-Ling (TPE) to gold.
• 2008 Women’s Weightlifting 58 kg.  Marina Shainova (RUS) [Silver] disqualified. Advance Jong-Ae O (PRK) to silver.
• 2008 Women’s Weightlifting 63 kg.  Irina Nekrasova (KAZ) [Silver] disqualified. Advance Ying-Chi Lu (TPE) to silver.
• 2008 Women’s Weightlifting 69 kg.  Liu Chunhong (CHN) [Gold] disqualified. Advance Oksana Slivenko (RUS) to gold.
• 2008 Women’s Weightlifting 75 kg.  Cao Lei (CHN) [Gold] disqualified. Advance Alla Vazhenina (KAZ) to gold.
• 2008 Men’s Weightlifting 94 kg.  Ilya Ilyin (KAZ) [Gold] disqualified. Advance Szymon Kołecki (POL) to gold.
• 2008 Men’s Wrestling 120 kg Greco-Roman.  Khasan Baroyev (RUS) [Silver] disqualified. Advance Mindaugas Mizgaitis (LTU) to silver, and Yury Patrikeyev (ARM) to bronze.
• 2008 Men’s Wrestling 60 kg Greco-Roman.  Vitaliy Rəhimov (AZE) [Silver] disqualified. Advance Nurbakyt Tengizbayev (KAZ) to silver, and Ruslan Tumenbayev (KGZ) to bronze.
• 2012 Women’s Athletics 800 metres.  Mariya Savinova (RUS) [Gold] disqualified. Advance Caster Semenya (RSA) to gold, and Yekaterina Poistogova (RUS) to silver.
• 2012 Women’s Athletics 1,500 metres.  Asli Cakir (TUR) [Gold] disqualified. Advance Maryam Jamal (BRN) to gold. No other advancement.
• 2012 Women’s Athletics 20 km walk.  Olga Kaniskina (RUS) [Silver] disqualified. Advance Qieyang Shenjie (CHN) to silver, and Liu Hong (CHN) to bronze.
• 2012 Women’s Athletics 4×400 relay.  Russia [Silver] disqualified. Advance Jamaica to silver, and the Ukraine to bronze.
• 2012 Women’s Athletics Discus throw.  Darya Pishchalnikova (RUS) [Silver] disqualified. Advance Li Yanfeng (CHN) to silver.
• 2012 Women’s Athletics Hammer throw.  Tatyana Lysenko (RUS) [Gold] disqualified. Advance Anita Włodarczyk (POL) to gold, Betty Heidler (GER) to silver, and Zhang Wenxiu (CHN) to bronze.
• 2012 Women’s Athletics Shot put.  Yevgeniya Kolodko (RUS) [Silver] disqualified. Advance Gong Lijiao (CHN) to silver, and Li Ling (CHN) to bronze.
• 2012 Women’s Athletics Steeplechase.  Yuliya Zaripova (RUS) [Gold] disqualified. Advance Habiba Ghribi (TUN) to gold, Sofia Assefa (ETH) to silver, and Milcah Chemos Cheywa (KEN) to bronze.
• 2012 Men’s Athletics 50 km walk.  Sergey Kirdyapkin (RUS) [Gold] disqualified. Advance Jared Tallent (AUS) to gold, Si Tianfeng (CHN) to silver, and Robbie Heffernan (IRL) to bronze.
• 2012 Men’s Athletics Javelin throw.  Oleksandr P’iatnytsia (UKR) [Silver] disqualified. Advance Antti Ruuskanen (FIN) to silver and Vitezslav Vesely (CZE) to bronze.
• 2012 Women’s Weightlifting 53 kg.  Zulfiya Chinshanlo (KAZ) [Gold] disqualified. Advance Shu-Ching Hsu (TPE) to gold.
• 2012 Women’s Weightlifting 63 kg.  Maiya Maneza (KAZ) [Gold] disqualified. Advance Christine Girard (CAN) to gold.
• 2012 Men’s Weightlifting 85 kg.  Apti Aukhadov (RUS) [Silver] disqualified. Advance Kianoush Rostami (IRI) to silver.

I will say, as an Olympic statistician, that trying to keep up with these disqualifications and medal re-assignments, and changing all the results, is one of the more challenging things we face.

There will be more as several others are under consideration and, as noted, several are under arbitration with the CAS. The IOC has not always made overt announcements of these medal re-assignments so it can be very difficult to keep track of this, although we have been in contact with people at the IOC to stay on top of it.

So as of mid-September 2017 that is the status of the 2008-12 Olympic doping testing – again, because of the uncertainty in some of the medal re-assignments, please understand that it is to the best of our knowledge.

A few months ago we looked at Olympic costs and how they related to both the number of athletes at the Olympics and the number of events contested, correcting all the figures against inflation. The post can be seen here – https://olympstats.com/2017/06/19/olympic-costs-rio-2016-and-future-projections/.

In that post we briefly touched on venue construction being affected by the number of events but did not analyze it deeply. Venue construction has been mentioned a lot in the recent awarding of the Games to Paris (2024) and Los Angeles (2028), in which Paris noted it had only to build “a few venues” including the Olympic Village and a media centre, while Los Angeles promised it did not need to build a single venue, a fact I look at somewhat dubiously.

When Peter Ueberroth was named head of the Los Angeles Organizing Committee for the 1984 Olympics, he famously later noted that his first project was to go and read all the previous Official Reports, to get some handle on Olympic Costs and what affects them. He did this at the Helms Foundation Library, which no longer exists, but has been subsumed within the LA84 Foundation Library in Los Angeles, a direct offspring of the 1984 Los Angeles Olympics.

Ueberroth noted that, to him, the most important and biggest cost faced by organizing committees (OCOGs) was the need to build venues and he decided he would host the 1984 Olympics by building as few of them as possible. He was helped by the fact that Los Angeles has and had myriad athletic facilities that he was able to use. He did end up having to build a velodrome, a swim stadium, and shooting range, but was able to get the velodrome and swim stadium paid for by sponsors – 7-Eleven and McDonalds, respectively.

So it appears that building venues and stadia is important in terms of the costs of the Olympics, but the question is how important is it, and can we estimate final Olympic costs based on how many venues the OCOG have to build? And is there a way to determine these figures?

Turns out, our Olympic stat group, the OlyMADMen, has compiled information on the venues of all the Olympics, in addition all the other facts our database contains. The venues can be found at our main site – www.olympedia.org – which for now is a private site, although we can provide access. Here is one of those pages of venues:

Further, we have detailed information on each venue, including, in most cases, the dates on which they were constructed. So we have a fairly good estimate of how any venues were constructed for each Olympics. To make this estimate, we made the assumption that any venue built within four years of the Olympics at which it served as a venue was likely constructed for that Olympics.

And what did we find? Here is the table of venue construction since the 1960 Roma Olympics, listing the percentage of all venues that were constructed specifically for each Olympic Games:

That doesn’t tell us much, although Los Angeles and Atlanta did not build many venues, and notably, Moscow in 1980 especially did not.

In our last post on Olympic costs, we looked carefully at how those costs were related to the number of athletes and the number of events. Venues are directly related to events, although you might not think so. But when you add new events, you may need to build new venues. Think of whitewater canoeing, which requires a completely new, fairly expensive venue for only a few events added onto the canoeing program. Or BMX cycling and mountain biking, which each require new venues for the cycling program, although the mountain bike venue is relatively construction free.

So since venues and events are related, we preferred to look at how venue construction related to costs per athlete at each Olympic Games. Here are the numbers for venue construction percentage and costs per athlete since 1960, with all figures corrected against inflation, using 2000 US dollars:

A couple of Games are obvious outliers here. Mainly Tokyo 1964 and Beijing 2008 are by far the most expensive Olympic Games ever (talking only Summer Olympics), which we knew. Further, omitting those 2 outliers, the modern era of costs and construction seems to begin in 1972, so we looked at venue construction vs cost/athlete since 1972, and omitted the absurdly expensive Beijing Olympics. Here is what that comparative table looks like, ranked in ascending order of venue construction percentage (VCP):

Is there anything we can make of this table, which seems to jump around quite a bit? Here is what the chart looks like for this table:

The dots on the chart are the data points, comparing costs against VCP, while the straight line is the best fit denoting the Pearson correlation coefficient (PCC). The PCC for this comparison is 0.3671. For those not familiar with PCC it analyzes if two sets of data are correlated together, i.e., if one moves up, does the other move up, and vice-versa. The PCC can range from 1 to -1. A PCC of 1 indicates a perfect correlation between two data sets, which rarely exists, while a a PCC of -1 is a perfect negative correlation, meaning if one set of data moves up, the other always moves down. A PCC of 0 equals no significant correlation in either direction.

So what does a PCC of 0.3671 mean? Unfortunately, there is no hard answer to that and it is open to interpretation. It is a positive number, meaning there is some correlation. But it is not very close to 1 so it is, at best, only a fair correlation between Olympic costs per athlete and VCP. Checking the PCC for its statistical significance, one finds it is weak, with a p-value between 0.15 and 0.10.

So this analysis somewhat supports Peter Ueberroth’s original contention, although not strongly. The number of athletes and number of events may still be a better predictor of overall Olympic costs, although venue construction certainly figures into the equation, at least to a degree, and it is directly related to the number of events.

This will be somewhat of a different post as it will deal only with USA Olympians. I don’t often do that, trying to always deal with the international set of Olympians but there are some reasons for this.

The post deals with USA Olympians and their college affiliations. This is somewhat unique to the USA that has a strong collegiate sports program, while most other nations focus on club sports.

Further, in some of the work I do with the US Olympic Committee (USOC) I am often asked which states have the most Olympians. That’s a difficult question to answer, trying to tell where somebody is “from.” I am a case in point – born in New Jersey, mostly raised in Massachusetts, lived most of my life in North Carolina, and now live in New Hampshire and South Carolina, I’ve lived in 10 states and 1 Canadian Province. Where the hell am I “from”?

So my default was to list athletes that had been born in a state, died in a state, and attended college in the state, which gave pretty good lists. Unfortunately our database of USA Olympians and their colleges was incomplete.

The reason for that is that we list the affiliations of athletes, but only those at the time of their Olympic participation. So if they attended Harvard, but later competed in the Olympics for the New York Athletic Club, Harvard would not be listed. So I felt like I had to do a fairly complex search to track down as many college affiliations as I could.

It is a Sisyphean task, and one that can never be completed. As I type this, somebody is enrolling in graduate school that I have “missed,” and the list will change yearly, and probably more frequently than that. But with the able assistance of Hilary Evans (@OlyStatman), we’ve come up with very complete lists of USA Olympians and the college affiliations, many of them attending multiple colleges.

As in my day job as a medical journal editor, I must list the inclusion and exclusion criteria. The database we compiled lists USA Olympians only, and only those in medal sports, not including demonstration sports. It does not include USA Olympians who were alternates or did not compete, and it does not include the USA competitors in the Arts Competitions from 1912-48. It also does not include Paralympians.

To be listed with a college affiliation, all we needed to know was if the athlete “attended” such a college – this list says nothing about graduation.

We excluded foreign athletes attending US colleges. Many of our US colleges have hosted foreign athletes who have later competed at the Olympics, but we are not including those, because of the original purpose of the database, as described above.

We excluded coaches, trainers, therapists, physicians, and other ancillary personnel who accompany the Olympic teams. As I attended the greatest university in the United States, and have three degrees from Duke (’73 BA, ’84 MD, ’90 Ortho), I would have liked to include Mike Krzyzewski, and other Duke coaches who have worked at the Olympics, to increase our “Olympian” count, but that is not the purpose of this project.

In summary, the database includes USA Olympians only, who competed in medal sports only, and who attended any known college, USA or otherwise, although the vast majority are US colleges. Many colleges have different lists, including foreign athletes, alternates, demo sport athletes, coaches and affiliate personnel, Paralympians, and others. We have no problems with any such lists, but the purpose of our project was to obtain a list of USA Olympic competitors and their college affiliations so we used the inclusion and exclusion criteria as above.

We have used multiple sources. First we used our Olympedia (www.olympedia.org) database, pulling any college affiliations for USA athletes. We also examined our text bios on the USA Olympians on Olympedia and pulled out the colleges mentioned. Then, we used a USOC database from 1990 that lists college affiliations. All USA Media Guides from 1956-2016 were fully examined. We also checked online lists of colleges and their Olympians. We then were fortunate enough to have contact with CoSIDA (College Sports Information Directors of America), via Doug Vance, their Executive Director, and Bill Hancock, Executive Director of the College Football Playoff. Doug contacted his membership and many of them sent us lists of their Olympians. Thanx to Doug and Bill for their help with this project.

Finally, Hilary Evans (@OlyStatman) did what Hilary always does, and better than anybody, which is find things nobody else can. Hilary went thru the entire list and found many missing and obscure affiliations.

The entire database of USA Olympians and their colleges can be found in the attached Excel spreadsheet (USA Olympians Colleges), but let’s look a little at who the leading colleges are.

The most prominent finding is that California colleges have contributed huge numbers of Olympians to the @TeamUSA effort. In fact the four leading schools, in terms of number of athletes, are: 1) Stanford, 2), UCLA, 3), USC, and 4) Cal Berkeley. Here is the top 20 by # of athletes, games attended, and medals won (Games = # of games attended by their athletes):

If we break this down by state, one of the original purposes of this search, this becomes even more dramatic. California has almost three times as many Olympians attending college there as the next US state, New York. Here are the top 10 states by # of Olympians:

Pretty dominant for California, isn’t it? Of note, athletes from California colleges have almost as many gold medals and medals as the next 9 highest ranking US states.

What about if we look at Summer and Winter? Surely California colleges cannot have the most Winter Olympians, can they? No, they don’t, that honor going to the University of Minnesota. Here are the lists of the top 10 for Summer and Winter USA Olympians:

 

What about by gender? Are there any differences among the colleges USA men and women Olympians have attended? Not really big differences, but here are those top 10 lists:

 

It does get more interesting when we look at sports and years, as many colleges often have certain sports for which they are best known (did I mention Duke and basketball?). Here are the leading 2-3 colleges for each of the sports on the Olympic Program:

The above are not separated by gender and you can see the female influence in several sports, notably in basketball, where the University of Tennessee ranks highly, and football (soccer), where the University of North Carolina ranks first, both based primarily on their female players.

Certain schools appear frequently on the above lists, as you would expect. Notably, Stanford and UCLA are among the top 3 in 9 sports, while Dartmouth, Harvard, and the University of Colorado are listed in 6 sports.

And here is how the top colleges have changed over the years, looking only at the top USA colleges represented at each Games:

 

There you can see some trends. In the early years of US Olympic participation the Ivy League schools contributed the most Summer Olympians, while since 1924 it has always been a California school.

Finally, one thing is obvious about this analysis – there have been a lot of smart young men and women on @TeamUSA, but we went a bit further. What about graduate schools?

We have that information as well, broken down by type of graduate or professional school, so here we list the top schools by each type, but also the known number of USA Olympians for each type of graduate or professional school.

Impressive that these tremendous athletes, who spend so much time training and competing, have also excelled academically. As to the Rhodes Scholars, there have been 34 known Rhodes Scholars among all Olympians, with 9 of those coming from the United States. Here is that list:

So that’s it. Full details can be found in the spreadsheet that lists all USA Olympians and their academic affiliations, which is linked above. Let us know if you see any errors or additions. As we stated, the list can never be complete and almost by necessity, is certainly incomplete.