[DC 86]

[quote author=Treebound link=topic=15401.msg167483#msg167483 date=1470868630]
Thanks for posting Eric, but as usual our Stanford sites are inconsistent.  If you look at the link below, which is noted in Wikipedia, Stanford athletes have won  280 medals.  Also, Eric Heiden won 5 golds in speed skating in the 1980 Lake Placid games and he's not listed in the link you found.    I still think Earl K and co should compile the definitive list broken out by US and all other countries. 

I would guess the 280 includes the winter Olympics and I could see us with 280 total (pre-Rio) with 243 from the summer games and 37 from the winter games, from the previous list

• Entering the 2016 Olympic Games, Stanford has won 243 overall medals (125 gold, 66 silver, 52 bronze).
  • [li]Leading the way among Stanford's 155 overall medalists are: Jenny Thompson (12 career medals), John Hencken (6), Janet Evans (5) and Pablo Morales (5).
    
  • The record for most medals won in a single Olympics is four, a feat accomplished by Jenny Thompson (2000), Summer Sanders (1992), Sharon Stouder Clark (1964) and Chris von Saltza Olmstead (1960).
    

which as you point out excludes Eric Heiden who won 5 medals in a single Olympics and should be on both of these lists if it included the winter olympics, that's one reason I think the 243 is summer and 280 is summer + winter.
[/quote]

This points out the inherent ambiguity involved in compiling these lists and why it's inevitable that various lists will be inconsistent. Consider Eric Heiden:

Competed internationally in speed skating from 1976-1980, retiring after his brilliant 5 gold medals (and 5 world records) at Lake Placid. During this time he was an undergrad at University of Wisconsin. After the Olympics he transferred to UCSD, and then he transferred to Stanford and graduated in 1984, at which point he started competing as a professional cyclist.

I'm proud that he's a fellow alumnus and great representative of the university, but it's a stretch to consider him a Stanford student-athlete in the context of the Olympics since he was at Wisconsin during the time that he was training and competing in speed skating. The counter argument is that he is indeed an alumnus (2x) and an Olympian, which opens the door for even more tenuous candidates such as Kerri Strug or even Al Oerter.

Bottom line is that different schools are going to use different criteria (and I assume that they will err on the side of inflating their numbers) and that third party articles are likely to be inconsistent due to the ambiguity of cases such as Heiden.

Personally I don't think Heiden should count towards Stanford's Olympic medal count, but if other schools are counting their numbers loosely then I understand that it's frustrating to feel short-changed when the numbers are compared, therefore tempting to use the same loose standards in compiling these lists.

[DC 86]

[quote author=Treebound link=topic=15401.msg167483#msg167483 date=1470868630]
Thanks for posting Eric, but as usual our Stanford sites are inconsistent.  If you look at the link below, which is noted in Wikipedia, Stanford athletes have won  280 medals.  Also, Eric Heiden won 5 golds in speed skating in the 1980 Lake Placid games and he's not listed in the link you found.    I still think Earl K and co should compile the definitive list broken out by US and all other countries. 

I would guess the 280 includes the winter Olympics and I could see us with 280 total (pre-Rio) with 243 from the summer games and 37 from the winter games, from the previous list

• Entering the 2016 Olympic Games, Stanford has won 243 overall medals (125 gold, 66 silver, 52 bronze).
  • [li]Leading the way among Stanford's 155 overall medalists are: Jenny Thompson (12 career medals), John Hencken (6), Janet Evans (5) and Pablo Morales (5).
    
  • The record for most medals won in a single Olympics is four, a feat accomplished by Jenny Thompson (2000), Summer Sanders (1992), Sharon Stouder Clark (1964) and Chris von Saltza Olmstead (1960).
    

which as you point out excludes Eric Heiden who won 5 medals in a single Olympics and should be on both of these lists if it included the winter olympics, that's one reason I think the 243 is summer and 280 is summer + winter.
[/quote]

This points out the inherent ambiguity involved in compiling these lists and why it's inevitable that various lists will be inconsistent. Consider Eric Heiden:

Competed internationally in speed skating from 1976-1980, retiring after his brilliant 5 gold medals (and 5 world records) at Lake Placid. During this time he was an undergrad at University of Wisconsin. After the Olympics he transferred to UCSD, and then he transferred to Stanford and graduated in 1984, at which point he started competing as a professional cyclist.

I'm proud that he's a fellow alumnus and great representative of the university, but it's a stretch to consider him a Stanford student-athlete in the context of the Olympics since he was at Wisconsin during the time that he was training and competing in speed skating. The counter argument is that he is indeed an alumnus (2x) and an Olympian, which opens the door for even more tenuous candidates such as Kerri Strug or even Al Oerter.

Bottom line is that different schools are going to use different criteria (and I assume that they will err on the side of inflating their numbers) and that third party articles are likely to be inconsistent due to the ambiguity of cases such as Heiden.

Personally I don't think Heiden should count towards Stanford's Olympic medal count, but if other schools are counting their numbers loosely then I understand that it's frustrating to feel short-changed when the numbers are compared, therefore tempting to use the same loose standards in compiling these lists.