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Medal count in absolute figures says little about which country does well in producing athletes, and a lot about the size of the population. One would think tha

by flexie 10y ago

Medal count in absolute figures says little about which country does well in producing athletes, and a lot about the size of the population. One would think that the US, Russia or China are good at producing great athletes when looking at these figures, but reality is that all three countries do a rather mediocre job when taking into consideration the size of their populations. This is a better measure: http://www.medalspercapita.com/#weighted-per-capita:2012 http://www.medalspercapita.com/#weighted-per-capita:2012 It reveals that you are more likely to become an olympic medalist if you are from the Caribbean, Scandinavia, certain Eastern European countries, Australia and New Zealand, than if you are Chinese, American or Russian. And please notice that the figures hold true for several Summer Olympics. The US, China and Russia don't dominate at all. Also the medal count per GDP is interesting.

tgb 10y ago
> It reveals that you are more likely to become an olympic medalist if you are from the Caribbean, Scandinavia, certain Eastern European countries, Australia and New Zealand, than if you are Chinese, American or Russian. The Olympics is actually set up to favor smaller countries by nature of having a cap on how many people from one country can compete in an event. There are probably many athletes from US/China/Russia that would compete were they from other countries.
- jazoom 10y ago
  They only send the best. The best tend to win the medals.
qxamak 10y ago
> It reveals that you are more likely to become an olympic medalist if you are from the Caribbean, Scandinavia, certain Eastern European countries, Australia and New Zealand, than if you are Chinese, American or Russian. Sure. But is that the same as "producing great athletes"? Many of the Caribbean nations also have populations that are ~100x smaller than the US, Russia, or China. Russia would need to win 430 medals (nearly half of the total medal count) just to compete with the Bahamas winning 1 medal based on this metric. Caribbean countries tend to do very well in track and field sports, but they don't send many athletes to compete in other sports. So it might be more informative to see the number of olympic qualifiers for each country (not just medal count) per capita. But I'm not sure that would be much better at determining which country produces the best athletes. There's so many confounding factors in the data that it's difficult to draw any real conclusions. I still find these kinds of statistics interesting though.

by flexie 10y ago

tgb 10y ago

> It reveals that you are more likely to become an olympic medalist if you are from the Caribbean, Scandinavia, certain Eastern European countries, Australia and New Zealand, than if you are Chinese, American or Russian. The Olympics is actually set up to favor smaller countries by nature of having a cap on how many people from one country can compete in an event. There are probably many athletes from US/China/Russia that would compete were they from other countries.

jazoom 10y ago
They only send the best. The best tend to win the medals.

qxamak 10y ago

> It reveals that you are more likely to become an olympic medalist if you are from the Caribbean, Scandinavia, certain Eastern European countries, Australia and New Zealand, than if you are Chinese, American or Russian. Sure. But is that the same as "producing great athletes"? Many of the Caribbean nations also have populations that are ~100x smaller than the US, Russia, or China. Russia would need to win 430 medals (nearly half of the total medal count) just to compete with the Bahamas winning 1 medal based on this metric. Caribbean countries tend to do very well in track and field sports, but they don't send many athletes to compete in other sports. So it might be more informative to see the number of olympic qualifiers for each country (not just medal count) per capita. But I'm not sure that would be much better at determining which country produces the best athletes. There's so many confounding factors in the data that it's difficult to draw any real conclusions. I still find these kinds of statistics interesting though.