Dartmouth alumni win Olympic silver, professor predicts results

Posted 10/06/00

The 2000 Olympic Games in Sydney, Australia resulted in silver medals for three of four Dartmouth alumni who participated in the games. And if there were an Olympic medal for prophecy, it would have to go a professor at the Tuck School of Business and a Yale colleague of his who predicted with remarkable accuracy which countries would win how many medals.

Dartmouth graduate Adam Nelson '97 was the first of the Big Green alumni participants in the games to win a silver medal, in the shot put competition. He threw the 16-pound metal ball 21.21 meters, or 69 feet 7 inches, just 3 inches shy of the gold medal toss, by a Finnish athlete.

Ted Murphy '94 later won silver in pairs rowing with his partner, Sebastian Bea, of San Francicso. The gold went to France, but the silver for Murphy and his partner was an unexpected triumph rather than a disappointment, because the pair had not been expected to advance to the medals stand at all, according to news reports. Murphy, who began rowing at Dartmouth in 1990, had also competed in the 1996 Olympics in Atlanta, but this medal was his first.

Henry Crawford Palmer '93 won a silver medal with the French basketball team in the final game against the United States, which won by the smallest margin in the U.S. team's history, 85-75. At one point in the last four minutes Palmer and his French teammates had that margin even narrower, at four points.

Dominic Seiterle '98 was part of a Canadian pairs rowing team, though he and his partner - Todd Hallett, from Dartmouth, Nova Scotia - did not win a medal.

Meanwhile, back on the Hanover Plain, a Tuck School professor and a colleague at Yale proved to have correctly predicted most of the overall outcome.

Andrew B. Bernard, Associate Professor of Economics at the Tuck School, and Meghan Busse of the Yale School of Management, issued a study before the games that predicted medal totals for the top 36 competing countries through a formula based on population, per capita income and home team advantage.

The study drew worldwide news attention before the games, and continued to draw attention after because 96 percent of its predictions turned out right -- including one that U.S. athletes would win 97 medals total, which was exactly the number they did win. Bernard and Busse also predicted that France would win 38 medals, which it did. The formula came within one medal for 12 countries and within three medals for 22 others.