If it takes a village to produce an Olympic athlete, Diane Simpson was lucky to be born in Evanston.

By the time a rhythmic gymnastics coach spotted aner at a local community center, an encounter that eventually led to a spot on the 1988 U.S. Olympic team, the 13-year-old Simpson was already primed for athletic success.

She had been a track star at her elementary school, encouraged by a gym teacher who saw her potential.

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She had played baseball on a team of boys that won a city championship.

And since the age of 7, she had been training in gymnastics at schools and gyms around the city — including at the very community center where she was discovered.

“I was lucky that all the variables were there,” Simpson said. “I definitely think Evanston has the community to support the athletes. That could be one of the reasons we had so many Olympians.”

Evanston is the birthplace of 29 athletes who have competed in the Olympics, more than any other town in Illinois save Chicago.

When taking population into account, Evanston is the champ, producing one Olympian for every 2,600 residents (Chicago has 1 for every 10,000).

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They’ve made it to the Olympics in 14 different sports, and their participation has spanned more than a century, from the 1900 Games in Paris to the Rio de Janeiro Games.

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They’ve racked up 18 medals, nine of them gold, and one of the athletes, swimmer and four-time gold medalist John Naber, is a member of the U.S. Olympic Hall of Fame.

The large number is a bit misleading, since Evanston’s role in developing many of the athletes was minimal or non-existent.

Some were just born in the suburb but never lived there, while others, like Naber, moved away long before they got into sports.

“I do not believe that Evanston can claim responsibility for my athletic success, but there may have been something in the water,” he joked.

Still, when you combine the athletes who stuck around with those who moved there, either as children or Northwestern University students, it’s clear that Evanston and its sports institutions have been outsized incubators of Olympic-level talent.

“I think growing up in a great and supportive community like Evanston pushed me to achieve great things,” said Margaret Bamgbose, who arrived from Chicago when she was 5 and is now running the 400 meters in Rio for Nigeria. “A lot of talented people have come out of Evanston Township (High School) so that was always a great legacy to look up to.”

Today’s Olympians usually claim their roots by listing a hometown, which is often different from the town in which they were born.

But Sports-Reference.com, a website the U.S. Olympic Committee views as authoritative, lists only the birthplaces for athletes from decades past.

Most Evanston-born Olympians were living elsewhere when they rose to athletic prominence, according to records and interviews.

Nancy Haberland, who made the 2004 team as a sailor, said she grew up in Northbrook.

Mark Gorski, a gold medal-winning track cyclist at the 1984 games, said his family left Evanston when he was a toddler, moving to Roselle and then Itasca.

Mike Flater, who played soccer for the U.S. at the 1972 games, said he lived in Evanston until he was 6, when his father’s job took the family to Europe.

Though Flater learned the game overseas, his birthplace did play a small role in his success, he said.

“I spent more time in Evanston Hospital than anything when I was a kid — concussion, appendicitis and other things,” he said. “They patched me up great. You’ve got to give them some credit for that.”

A few Olympians, though, have been through-and-through Evanstonians.

Dick Hanley, who won a silver medal in swimming at the 1956 games, was born in the suburb and grew up there.

Though he learned to swim at a Michigan summer camp, he didn’t train seriously until he joined Evanston Township’s powerhouse team, with whom he won three individual state titles and three team championships.

Hanley said he worked out a lot on his own, swimming extra laps at the Northwestern University pool, but he gave some credit to Evanston’s coach, William “Dobbie” Burton, for helping him develop as an athlete.

“Burton was a really good motivator,” he said. “When he talked, you listened. He got you ready to go.”

That combination of coaches, facilities and opportunity often produces elite athletes, and it’s a mixture most reliably found in wealthier communities.

Patrick Adler of the Martin Prosperity Institute at the University of Toronto has analyzed the hometowns of recent Olympians and found that some well-to-do areas, such as the communities of Southern California, send more than their share of athletes to the games.

“You look at places that punch above their weight, they tend to be a little more affluent and that makes sense, because the costs (of training a young athlete) are usually borne by the families,” he said.

Though Evanston is far from the wealthiest town on the North Shore, Olympic speedskater Nathaniel Mills, whose family spent a few years there in the 1990s, noted that it has plenty of places where the athletically-minded can learn their craft.

“In speedskating, it’s obviously got a wonderful club (based at the city’s Robert Crown Community Center),” he said. “There’s a university there, health clubs, Sheridan Road for training on the bike. It’s a place with a lot of resources.”

Northwestern’s role is particularly prominent.

The school has been home to 38 Olympians, and while many were accomplished athletes before enrolling, others got their start there.

Jim Carpenter took a fencing class as a sophomore, looking only for a fun way to get in shape, and discovered that he loved the sport. He went on to join the school team and kept at it long after he graduated in 1985, traveling to Europe and back to find the best training opportunities.

His odyssey paid off in 1996, when he made the U.S. team that competed at the Atlanta Games.

Would he have ever done the sport had he gone to school elsewhere?

“No way — certainly not at the level I ended up being,” said Carpenter, now the fencing coach at the Stevens Institute of Technology in New Jersey. “It was definitely Northwestern that gave me the opportunity.”

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