The ‘Californization’ of the Olympics

The skateboarder Nyjah Huston from Davis is one of the many Olympians from the Golden State.Credit...Chang W. Lee/The New York TimesStop me if you’ve heard this one before: If California were its own country, it would rank fifth in an Olympic medal count.

Dr. Bill Mallon, who had recently landed in Tokyo when I reached him by phone this week, couldn’t say for sure whether that was true. But, he told me, the state would rank “almost certainly in the top 10.”

What he could say for sure was that, in terms of producing Olympians, California’s universities are at the top of the list. As of about 2012, Mallon said, Stanford had sent 289 American athletes to the Games, the most of any school. That…