4 ms·
> Different people have different conventions for how to rank the Olympic medal results. The newspaper in my country sometimes used another method, where they
by vorg 9y ago
> Different people have different conventions for how to rank the Olympic medal results.
The newspaper in my country sometimes used another method, where they divide the medal count by the population of the country. In 2008 that put Jamaica at the top, followed by New Zealand. Both China and the U.S. were well down in the chart.
- laretluval 9y agoDo you live in Jamaica or New Zealand?
- vorg 9y agoHow did you guess?
- pishpash 9y agoA more helpful metric would be medals divided by delegation size.
- philjohn 9y agoOr medals divided by money invested in a nation's olympics programme.
- evgen 9y agoSo how do we count the amount spent on US collegiate athletics that provides the bulk of training for most of these small-nation athletes?
- pishpash 9y agoSo this ranking exists (but keep in mind the error bars on some countries with 1-2 medals): http://andybarefoot.com/olympics/#medal-efficiency http://andybarefoot.com/olympics/#medal-efficiency
- Someone 9y agoThat partly measures a policy choice "how good must athletes be for us to send them to the Olympics?" Different countries make different choices there. Small poorer countries, for example, aren't likely to have any athlete who can get to the final in the 100 meters, but yet may want to send an athlete to that event, simply because it is one of the cheapest events to send someone for, and they don't want to send a zero sized team (for example because they want to earn 'legitimacy points' as a country or because their Olympic committee wants to make a trip to the Olympics) The USA, on the other hand, isn't likely to send anybody who can't make the final in that event. Part of the reason for that is that they try hard good candidates, but part also simply is that they can make way more throws of the genetic dice, and thus are more likely to hit on an outlier who performs exceptionally well.
- pishpash 9y agoIf you have a notion of "country" that you're measuring things against, then the genetic darts they have is just an intrinsic property. Normalizing by total population is almost certainly not the right metric, but to your point, there could exist more sophisticated distribution-based metrics that better capture the distribution mean which is what you might be after.
- avip 9y agoAdding a sheep-factor could help boost NZ up the list.