Women dominate Team USA at Tokyo Olympics: America’s Olympics squad by the numbers

Of the 613 athletes on this year’s US Olympic team, 329 are female – the most women any country has ever sent to the Olympics

Of all the stats of the United States Olympic team, this may be the most memorable: 329.

That’s how many women are on Team USA this year, significantly outnumbering the 284 men. The 613-person team is 54 per cent female, and a record breaker – no nation in history has sent that many female athletes to the Olympics.

Steve Kornacki of NBC, the station broadcasting the games, broke down the numbers on his big board in Tokyo on Friday. Mr Kornacki, also known as the “map man”, became a viral sensation last year for his high-energy numerical analyses of the 2020 election. (Online sales of khakis, which he typically wears, are believed to have skyrocketed because of his broadcasts.)

In Tokyo, Mr Kornacki listed several other notable statistics about America’s team. The team’s biggest sport by far is track and field, with 128 athletes. A distant second is swimming, with 53 athletes.

The oldest athlete on the team is 57-year-old equestrian Phillip Dutton, and the youngest is the swimmer Katie Grimes, who is just 15 years old. The youngest athlete at this years Games is 12-year-old Syrian table tennis player Hend Zaza.

There are also 16 US military service members on the team, including the bronze medal-winning pole vaulter Sam Kendricks, who is also a lieutenant in the US army reserve.

The athletes come from 46 different states, plus Washington DC. The team’s most-represented state is California, where 126 of the team’s members hail from. Colorado comes in second, with 34 athletes.

It’s no surprise, then, that the college that produced the most Olympians is a California school – Stanford University, with 32 athletes on the team.

The 2020 Tokyo Olympics began on Friday, after a year-long delay due to the coronavirus pandemic. The games are taking place under extremely unusual circumstances, with almost no spectators allowed as Japan battles another wave of the virus. The games are scheduled to finish on 8 August.