Can America keep racking up Olympic medals? The key is in the future of college sports

SAINT-DENIS, France — Like just about everyone who has spent even the slightest bit of time at Stade de France during the Olympic track meet, Sebastian Coe has basically been blown away by the power, depth and white-hot speed of the American track and field team.

Men and women, distance and sprints, jumps, throws, combined events, doesn’t matter. The Americans are picking up medals just about everywhere. They are arguably the greatest national track team ever assembled, and among the biggest stars of the show for a Team USA contingent that does not lack for star power with the likes of Stephen Curry and LeBron James on it.

Coe, a two-time Olympic champion from Great Britain in the 1980s who now leads World Athletics, the sport’s international governing body, knows how this came about, beyond the advantages of wealth and population that the U.S. has.

“That is really a testament to the college system, good college coaching,” said Coe, speaking just before American runners and jumpers won eight medals, three of them gold, in about 90 mad minutes Thursday night.

Coe knows track and field inside and out. He is also close with countless top athletes in his sport and others. He knows the global sports landscape as well as anyone. “The quality of coaching now coming out of the U.S. is probably at a higher standard,” he said. “U.S. track and field has a lot to owe to the college system.”

Coe’s words will be at the heart of perhaps the biggest issue that American Olympic officials will confront when the flame goes out in Paris, where the Americans have dominated the overall medal table but can feel the world — especially China — breathing down their necks, particularly in winning gold medals.

They know that the American college sports system, which every year sustains and trains thousands of students in Olympic sports — both Americans and international students — is their golden goose. They are desperate to do whatever it takes to make sure it doesn’t get cooked by budget-conscious administrators and college presidents who might see runners and wrestlers and gymnasts as a drain on resources instead of an asset.

“What we’ve seen in the last few years is that college presidents and ADs are not willing to massively cut Olympic sports programs, but that may happen,” Rocky Harris, the chief sports performance executive at the U.S. Olympic and Paralympic Committee and former top athletic administrator at Arizona State University, said in an interview this week. “We have to advise them and help them change as their world changes but make changes that won’t adversely impact us.”

Now, forgive most of the rest of the world if their Olympians find this state of borderline panic a little rich. The Americans are going to come through Paris with results that would produce national celebrations in most countries.

For an eighth consecutive Summer Games, the U.S. will win more medals than any other country. Once again, it wasn’t even close.

By the middle of the second week, as the U.S. track and field team began to run away with its armloads of medals, the women’s volleyball team prevailed in a series of squeakers to reach the gold-medal game and the women’s soccer team reasserted itself as a world power after last year’s round of 16 exit at the World Cup.

There was even a former venture capitalist named Kristen Faulkner who rode away with the gold medal in her road race, even though she only started cycling seriously just six years ago.

Good thing, because the Americans are going to need every gold medal they can get to prevail over China in that race. Starting what was essentially the B team for the 4×400 meter mixed relay early in the track meet might end up costing the U.S. the top spot in the gold-medal count. The Americans got silver in that one. The three-time defending women’s water polo team lost its semifinal in a shootout and ended up missing the podium altogether. That’s how thin the margins have become.

The Americans hit their high-water mark for gold medals in 2012 in London when they won 48. China was nine behind that year, with 39. The U.S. had its largest margin of victory in Rio in 2016, when it beat out Great Britain 46-27.

Since then, the world has been catching up. Part of this has to do with the inevitable ebbs and flows of the creation of Olympic unicorns, athletes who can win gold medals in bunches. There are only so many versions of Michael Phelps and Katie Ledecky and Simone Biles out there.

The U.S. run of medal dominance has been fueled in part by unicorn medal-winners like Michael Phelps, who won an astounding 28 medals across four Olympics. (Al Bello / Getty Images)

The latest one, the 22-year-old swimmer Léon Marchand, happens to be French, though he spent the last three years training at an American college, a point that Olympic organizers were urging NBC and any other outlet they could to hammer home.

Marchand has plenty of company. Julien Alfred of Saint Lucia became the so-called world’s fastest woman by winning the 100 meters. She attended the University of Texas. Josh Kerr of Scotland, who ran for the University of New Mexico, won silver in the 1,500 meters, a battle Coe called “a race for the ages.”

“It’s critical for Team USA, but it’s also something America can celebrate, that we help produce all these athletes,” Sarah Hirshland, the chief executive of the USOPC, said during an interview on Friday, hoping her message was landing with college presidents and administrators. “We need them to be very thoughtful about what collegiate sports mean on campus.”

Swimming, Hirshland pointed out, doesn’t generate much in the way of profits for a university, “That doesn’t mean it doesn’t deserve to be on a college campus.”

Hirshland said the USOPC is in the midst of a continuous lobbying campaign in Washington, D.C., where politicians are contemplating legislation that could mandate certain treatment and pay for collegiate athletes. The focus is largely on football and basketball players, who want to share in the revenues they produce, but it may also change the status of athletes in sports that don’t make a profit. If Congress makes those costs too high, more colleges might try to cut more Olympic sports.

Harris and Hirshland know how calamitous that could be.

“If Oregon were to ever cut track, that would be a huge problem for us,” Harris said. “If Stanford ever cut swimming, that would be a huge problem.”

Beyond the direct financial support, coaching and training that college delivers, there is the hard-to-replicate competitive experience.

Justine Wong-Orantes, the libero for the U.S. women’s volleyball team, had plenty of digs and sets that kept the American hopes for a second consecutive gold medal alive against Brazil Friday afternoon. The Americans prevailed in five sets playing in front of a loud and hostile Brazilian crowd.

Wong-Orantes was quick to credit her experience at the University of Nebraska, where women’s volleyball is big and sometimes takes place in a sold-out football stadium.

“I know what playing in a big atmosphere is like,” she said.

Then there is the collegiate knock-on effect on how parents raise their kids. Would American parents invest what can amount to tens of thousands of dollars every year to support their childrens’ athletic development if the carrot of a potential college scholarship or a leg up in getting into a prestigious college wasn’t out there?

The U.S. fencing program is essentially a collection of Harvard, Princeton and Columbia students and graduates. Adrian Weinberg, the goalie on the American men’s water polo team that will play for a bronze medal Sunday, graduated from the University of California-Berkeley in 2023.

Weinberg grew up in Los Angeles, where admission to Cal is akin to a hard-earned lottery ticket. His decade of youth, club and high school volleyball surely helped him get it.

And therein lies the not-so-secret sauce that American Olympic officials and young athletes, both in the U.S. and elsewhere, hope remains intact. The through-line to the overwhelming majority of Olympic medals of all colors is that they come from sports that have a presence on college campuses.

The NCAA system isn’t just helping Americans. French star Léon Marchand is one of many foreign Olympians training at U.S. colleges. (Christian Liewig – Corbis / Corbis via Getty Images)

Track? Check.

Swimming? Check.

Fencing? Check.

Volleyball? Check.

Women’s rugby? Check.

Taekwondo? Canoeing? Not so much.

Behind another 100-plus medal performance and a down-to-the-wire race for the most gold medals are tentacles that stretch from the most hallowed academic halls to the after-school recreation program at the local YMCA. It includes famous and not-so-famous coaches on the cutting edge of their sports, and millions of anonymous parents nudging their children to compete in a talent pool that is, in part, so broad and wide because of the incentives and potential payoffs that make it so.

Nothing lasts forever, though, or without the work required to sustain it. With the first home Summer Games since 1984 set to arrive in Los Angeles in four years, that work has never felt so important to the people doing it.

“Our plan is to spend the next four years building up our athletes’ star power,” Harris said. “We want our athletes to be the stars.”

(Top photo of Americans Anna Cockrell and Sydney McLaughin-Levrone showing off their medals from the women’s 400-meter hurdles: Patrick Smith / Getty Images)