The Geography of the U.S. Olympic Team

Two hundred and forty-four American Olympians made their way from the United States to Pyeongchang, South Korea, for this year’s Olympics. Given that these are the Winter Games, you might expect a majority of America’s Olympians to hail from cold, snowy mountaintop places and winter sports locales. But that’s not exactly the case.

The U.S. delegation comes from a wide array of places, according to state-level data from the U.S. Census Bureau and metropolitan-area data gathered by Patrick Adler, my colleague at the Martin Prosperity Institute. Although the Olympians competing in some alpine sports are clustered around ski country, the athletes in many other sports—especially those that take place indoors, like figure skating and speed skating—tend to come from a wider variety of places, including big cities and metro areas. The U.S. Winter Olympic team is actually far less unequal, spatially, than most other aspects of American society.