McGlamery Base Camp

2008 Olympics University Medal Counts

A couple of days ago, someone sent me an e-mail that touted the success of athletes at the 2008 Olympics in Beijing who had attended my undergraduate alma mater, Auburn University. Auburn athletes were indeed successful, garnering 18 medals. The writer of the e-mail had compared this total to that of other countries, and surprisingly, Auburn athletes did as well as Canada and Spain and better than countries like the Netherlands and Brazil.

The writer did not, however, compare Auburn with other universities, so I decided to search around and see how some other universities noted for their intercollegiate athletics programs did. Here are the results:

University Total Gold Silver Bronze
Stanford University 25 8 13 4
University of Southern California 21 9 10 2
Auburn University 18 3 10 5
University of California, Berkeley 17 5 9 3
University of California, Los Angeles 15 4 9 2
University of Texas at Austin 14 10 2 2
University of Florida 14 5 4 5
University of Michigan 12 9 1 2
University of Tennessee 6 3 3 0
Louisiana State University 4 2 2 0
University of Georgia 4 0 3 1

Auburn’s medals came in only two sports, swimming and track & field. Only two medalists from Auburn competed for the United States. Stanford’s 25 medals came in 13 different sports (counting men’s and women’s sports separately). Eight of Michigan’s nine gold medals are solely attributable to Michael Phelps. Texas, my graduate alma mater, wins the gold medal count among these schools.

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