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Olympic medals per capita
- drpgq 10y agoAmount of GDP versus medals would be interesting as well.
- sevenless 10y agoWas thinking Olympic medals per local dollar-equivalent spent on training. Who's got the most cost-effective sports programs?
- dogma1138 10y agoIt's a bit harder to estimate, it's like evaluating NASA and ROSCOSMOS, NASA's budget is considerably larger but it's not necessarily "less efficient" just because each mission costs more. Olympic medals per portion of GDP spent on sports education and the olympic team in each country might be a better method. Also a good metric is how much effort/cost does it take to get into the olympic team of each country, the US is somewhat special in this case since in some cases one needs to break a world record just to get pass the team's trials since they have a huge pool of athletes competing for spots. But the US is an outlier in general, it's pretty much the only country where you can live as a semi-pro athlete and actually make money, college sports are better funded than most professional sports leagues in other countries (NCAA has a 700M club pool, UEFA champions league has a club pool of about 700M EURO's), and college athletic scholarships exist for virtually every sport.
- jessaustin 10y agoAnother page on TFA's site: http://www.medalspercapita.com/#medals-by-gdp:2016 http://www.medalspercapita.com/#medals-by-gdp:2016
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- hughes 10y agoSmaller countries can also get disproportionate representation in the olympics. When there's one team or competitor per country, the smallest country has the highest per-capita representation. While they have a smaller pool of athletes to draw from, I'd bet it changes the potential outcome where a straight up per-capita medal count is also somewhat misleading. I wonder what medals per competitor per capita would look like?
- sevenless 10y agoThey also have more variability. A tiny nation that gets one medal gets a huge per-capita frequency. You'd want to regularize it a bit.
- greenshackle 10y agoDefinitely. A similar example: at one point studies started coming out that showed the best performing schools were small. Cue a lot of noise on how small schools are better, if you want your kids to be successful, send them to a small school, etc. I think these findings even showed up in government reports/recommendations. Problem is, the worst performing schools were also small. Almost all of the effect could be explained by higher variance. Unfortunately I don't remember where where I read about this, wish I could provide sources. EDIT: found it. It wasnt government, it was the Gates foundation, who spent billions into supporting smaller schools. http://press.princeton.edu/chapters/s8863.pdf http://press.princeton.edu/chapters/s8863.pdf
- sevenless 10y agoOh my God. They wasted a billion dollars and made education worse because they didn't understand variance.
- dragonwriter 10y agoWhile the research wasn't performed by the government, I think its the basis for the move toward small "schools-within-schools" as an educational "reform" in a number of public schools.
- jedberg 10y agoWhat I'm looking for is a chart of total medals vs. possible medals. For example, for a country that only has one athlete in one sport, their total possible medals is 1. So if they get 1 medal, they have a 100% success rate, which is pretty good. I've seen charts of total medals vs # of athletes participating, but that's not quite right, because it doesn't account for team sports. One country might have 4 people on the swim relay team, but that's still only one possible medal (and if they win it should only count as one). I suspect someone will link me directly to what I'm looking for soon, but I've yet to find it on my own.
- unethical_ban 10y agoThe breakdown by team vs. individual, and then unique individual athletes with medals would be interesting. Weight Phelps and a bronze Judo winner equally, in order to better capture the individual talent and reduce "talent stacking" of having a single athlete winning 10 variations on swimming.
- jessaustin 10y agoYeah swimming is sort of combinatorially ridiculous. They really ought to be able to get by with two strokes rather than four. Backstroke and freestyle would make the most aesthetic sense to me, because I don't really see the point in a race using an inherently slower technique but I can see the point of going backwards. However, don't add a bunch of sidestroke races!
- sevenless 10y agoFreestyle isn't a stroke, technically. You can swim any stroke that you like[0], and swimmers usually choose the front crawl. [0] provided that you don't swim the whole thing underwater
- jessaustin 10y agoYeah that's the point. They can get rid of the races in which the "proper" stroke is specified in complicated fashion.
- rezashirazian 10y agoI just noticed India has no medals. Can someone with more knowledge on this perhaps shed some light? Of the remaining sports are there any that India is a medal contender? I find it odd that a country with more than 1.2 billion would go through the olympics empty handed.
- EwanToo 10y agoThe BBC published an article on this last week: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-india-36941269 http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-india-36941269
- sremani 10y agoExcuses, Excuses. When DPRK, Bahamas, Bahrain, UAE, Brunei can win medals. There is no sound logic for any reason the apologists present for India not winning medals. Incompetence across the board (with an exception of some real hard working athletes). Phelps has more medals than India in its entire Olympics participation. Shame. Shame. Shame. edit: if downvoting me to hell is going to give a bronze medal to India, then please down-vote me to oblivion.
- azernik 10y agoYou're being downvoted because you're rejecting a coherent explanation in favor of insults and vague mentions of "incompetence". If you're claiming Indian athletes are incompetent - WHY? Lack of training, the good talent decides on other career paths, etc.
- sremani 10y ago#1. I am old enough and tired enough to not worry about Karma points. People are free to down-vote, I am just trying to get a point across. #2. The article is not deep, it rings like shallow talking point of India not getting medal apologists. #3. Incompetence from head to toe. There are multiple factors, but to simplify and make it sound like a single problem issue, the biggest impediment to Indian sports are Indian Olympic Committee and Ministry of Sports, are primarily plump political posts. #4. No number of explanations can convince me there is a method behind the madness of 1.2 billion people that too a majority under the age of 30, cannot win one bronze medal. To win one bronze medal, you really do not need Nike or University of Oregon track and field program. Smaller nations that are far more corrupt than India were pulling medals and India did not. This is not a one off, India has remained at the bottom of medal tally for long time, Bejing and London gave some hope because of multiple medals, and now reverting to big ZERO is disheartening and maddening at the same time.
- tener 10y agoGrenada rocks.
- jessaustin 10y agoWell, Kirani James does, anyway.
- pingec 10y agoSlovenia should be updated, we got 4 medals so far, not 3.
- loader 10y agoWhy the lack of Winter Olympics data except for Sochi?
- fastball 10y agoUnfortunately, there is no easily accessible API to get Olympic medal data, so the creator of this website undoubtedly has to do some semi-manual data input.
- ben_jones 10y agoFWIW this SPA was written with plain javascript + jQuery and one of Google's visualization APIs. Pretty cool imo.
- SubiculumCode 10y agoI bet the smaller countries tend to have lower test-retest intra-class correlations, olympics to olympics.
- EnFinlay 10y agoMan, I was excited to see Vancouver 2010 numbers.
- Someone 10y agoIt wouldn't be suitable for the general public, but here's how I would do the comparison for potential: - assume a normal distribution of innate ability. - assume a different normal distribution of each individual's variation in scoring (all with an expected value of zero and identical variance, smaller than that of innate ability) - assume each nation picks its best athletes in trials (doesn't really happen; for example, Bolt wouldn't have qualified for Rio if Jamaica did that) What you will get is that China and India should each have about 15% of the best performers. However, top performers of other large countries will not be far behind them in innate ability, so that there is a decent chance that their form of the day will make them beat better players. Also, most of the best athletes will live in countries with large populations, and most of those will not make it to the Olympics because they get beaten by their compatriots in qualification, either because of lack of innate ability or due to 'luck'. End result I guess will be that each country that is large enough (pure guess: 50 million+, say Argentina, Britain, Colombia, France, Germany, Kenya, South Korea or anything larger) should, aan else being equal, get about the same number of medals. Of course, not all else is equal. Any difference will be due to other factors: - sport-mindedness (example: New Zealand) - money invested (example: Great Britain, Qatar (a country that _buys_ Olympic champions) - genetic make-up (example: Fiji in rugby) - culture (example: table tennis and China, or India as a negative example for almost any sport that isn't cricket or field hockey) - religion (many countries send a token female athlete because they have to, thus giving up about 50% of their potential number of medals) Those are hard to quantify, and can change significantly over time. Britain is an extreme example, with 1 (one!) gold medal at the 1996 Olympics. Lottery money has changed that tremendously, not only for the home Olympics in London. A final factor is that countries that are willing to spend money will influence what sports become Olympic sports. I don't think it is accidental that there are so many events in athletics and swimming, two sports that the US excels at. Advertising money buys events.
- jdminhbg 10y ago> A final factor is that countries that are willing to spend money will influence what sports become Olympic sports. I don't think it is accidental that there are so many events in athletics and swimming, two sports that the US excels at. Advertising money buys events. I don't doubt that advertising plays a role in which events exist, but athletics and swimming have had lots of events since the dawn of the Olympics, probably because they're easy to set up and they don't take a long time to run. If you were trying to get the US more medals, you might have 3-on-3 basketball, 1-on-1 basketball, 12 minute basketball, H.O.R.S.E., a dunk contest, etc.
- jpatokal 10y agoThe "all time" view is also interesting, although it's pretty heavily skewed towards northern Europe thanks to the origins of the competition: http://www.medalspercapita.com/#medals-per-capita:all-time http://www.medalspercapita.com/#medals-per-capita:all-time Sic transit gloria mundi: Finland's at the top of the all-time rankings, but doesn't have a single medal so far in 2016 (although there's an unexpected one coming up in female boxing, as an essentially unknown boxer just beat the world champion and semifinalists are guaranteed at least a bronze).
- tomjakubowski 10y ago> semifinalists are guaranteed at least a bronze Huh. How does that work? Are the semi-finals a three person round robin, rather than a four-person bracket? Do they give out two bronze medals? edit: yes, two bronzes in fighting sports, because the minimum rest period between matches makes a "bronze medal match" difficult to schedule. source: https://www.quora.com/Why-are-there-2-bronze-medals-awarded-in-combat-sports https://www.quora.com/Why-are-there-2-bronze-medals-awarded-...
- willyt 10y ago( population * gdp ) / number of medals Would be more interesting. Medals cost money. The UK has invested something like £5m per medal won.