The road to the 2018 Winter Olympics in Pyeongchang, South Korea, runs through Norwich, a hilly and wooded family-oriented farming community tucked between Interstates 89 and 91 in rural Vermont. With a main street lined with white clapboard colonial buildings and a landmark steepled church, Norwich could be a set designer’s rendering of a tiny New England village.
Yet despite its apparent ordinariness, Norwich is home to a probabilities puzzle for the statistics students at Dartmouth College, less than two miles away as the hermit thrush flies.
This town of roughly 3,000 residents has accounted for three Olympic medals, and, since 1984, has put an athlete on all but one United States Winter Olympics team.