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Hungary's Katinka Hosszu (USC) and America's Maya DiRado (Stanford) came out of the U.S. college ranks
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The American amateur sports system’s ripples are felt far and wide at the Summer Olympics, whether or not the athletes are wearing the red, white and blue.
Team USA proper is 554 strong, but another 433 international athletes have trained at and competed for American college teams at some point in their lives, according to a document created at the start of the Games by Sarah Wilhelmi, the U.S. Olympic Committee’s new director of collegiate partnerships.
In a separate count that includes incoming athletes too, the NCAA counted 1,108 total Olympians who can claim some kind of U.S. college allegiance. Counting the current foreign athletes alone, 56 countries in addition to the U.S. have NCAA athletes on their team. That’s about 10 percent of all Olympians and about a quarter of all countries here in Rio.
The NCAA says 168 current college athletes are here, including 118 international athletes.
Not surprisingly, after Team USA, Canada leads the list of current NCAA athletes in Rio with 20. Jamaica has eight, the Bahamas has seven, Hungary has six and host country Brazil has five. The foreign NCAA athletes are mostly in track and field and swimming, though water polo, soccer, golf and fencing also make the list.
