Celebrating Olympians With a Questionable Comparison

It is exciting to hear that there will be so many current and former Princeton students competing in Paris! However, comparing Princeton’s Olympian production rate to those of Angola, Botswana, Vietnam, and Moldova (New at PAW Online, July 9, 2024) as a way of showing how impressive Princeton is seems very reductive. Was that sentence meant to imply that Princeton is more athletic than those countries? Or was it attempting to highlight that the inequality between countries is so extreme, the sporting infrastructure so disparate, and Princeton and its students so privileged, that even among the entire population of Botswana, for example, so few of its athletes are able to attend the Olympics? If you are going to throw out a comparison like that I would like to see some investigation into the reason for the disparity between the number of Olympic athletes from entire countries compared to from one small institution. If you are not prepared to look into this then perhaps the comparison was unnecessary.