5 ms·

Olympic Medal Count, Adjusted for Population and GDP

39 points by aggieben 18y ago

ars 18y ago
It's interesting but I can not find any correlation at all. So I'd guess the conclusion is that olympic medals have nothing to do with population size or money. Instead it has everything to do with if the country cares or not. India clearly doesn't.
- deleted 18y ago
  [deleted]
- ajross 18y ago
  There's a slight anti-correlation with population size. Large nations with conventionally "successful" olympic programs (USA, China, Russia) are well below median in medals per capita. My guess is that this is because there's an upper limit on entrants. The USA and China might be much more likely to get medals, but they're still limited to three per event at maximum. There might be events where a big nation (China and diving comes to mind) might be able to get even more medals, but can't because they only have so many slots.
  - timr 18y ago
    That's the noise you'd expect from a random process. Any country with an Olympic program has some chance of earning a medal. Thus, given a sufficiently large number of small countries, you'd expect that a random subset of those nations would earn a higher number of medals per capita than the big players. That Jamaica is at the top of the list is a decent example -- without the unexpected, astronomical weirdness of Usain Bolt, they'd have half as many golds. The larger programs have a greater number of chances to win, but normalizing by GDP or national population doesn't tell you anything about the overall probability of an athlete from country X winning a medal (which is arguably what you want to know). To get that information, you'd have to normalize by something else -- like size of team, or program expenditure, or some factor that's more directly related to athletics than GDP or population.
    - dejb 18y ago
      Yes I agree. To make the list statistically valid you should probably only look at those countries with more than say 15 or 20 medals. I wonder who comes out on top then? :)
      - whatusername 18y ago
        More than 15 total medals. Looking at GDP per Medal. * Cuba ------- 1,879 * Belarus ------- 2,038 * Ukraine ------- 5,204 * Russia ------- 17,861 * Australia ------- 19,341 * South Korea ------- 31,674 * China ------- 32,990 * Netherlands ------- 47,181 * Great Britain ------- 59,000 * France ------- 62,875 * Italy ------- 73,857 * Canada ------- 78,111 * Spain ------- 78,611 * Germany ------- 79,488 * United States ------- 125,364 * Japan ------- 173,840 Who were expecting on top?
        timr 18y ago
        Tough to say. What this (perhaps) suggests is that there are more good athletes per capita in Cuba than in Japan. But there are a lot of confounding factors, so I wouldn't read too much into it. For example, one needs to consider the amount of money invested into training and selection of athletes. The US is somewhat lackadaisical about selecting athletes at a young age, whereas the eastern bloc countries tend to be a bit more motivated....
        dejb 18y ago
        I suspect you are deliberately missing the point for the purposes of mischief. I was talking about the population ones which would go like this Population Gold * Australia ---- 1,528,165 * Netherlands ---- 2,349,286 * Belarus ---- 2,422,500 * Great Britain ----- 3,052,632 * South Korea ----- 3,709,538 Population Medals * Australia ----- 465,094 * Cuba ------ 469,500 * Belarus ----- 510,000 Huge Gap .... * Netherlands ----- 1,027,813 Anything stand out to you about these? :)
        whatusername 18y ago
        To be honest - I was trying to prove that point with the GDP figures.. (but the pesky actual data got in the way)... Good to see that Population proves it out though!
- ericwan 18y ago
  an interesting factor to see might be whether they're communist or the pro-West before the end of cold war.
- ad 18y ago
  The best I could do was an "authoritarian index", using the (GDP / Population) / Gold Medals and Total Medals. If you rank them by that, you see some pretty nasty countries near the top, and nice countries near the bottom. Zimbabwe, North Korea and China round out the top three... Ethiopia is ok but does lack freedom of the press, etc. Then look at the bottom of the list: all free market, liberal democracies. Finland, Belgium,etc, Bahrain, arguably the most democratic country in the Gulf, Slovenia, etc, on the way up. There are statistical blips of course. Jamaica is near the top because they are just that aweseome. Also, I just made this up so it's probably completely wrong. To put forth the very rough and completely unscientific theory: A more authoritarian country is willing to put in more effort, per dollar of GDP and amount of population, to get gold medals. They've got more to prove.
- luckystrike 18y ago
  So I'd guess the conclusion is that olympic medals have nothing to do with population size or money. Instead it has everything to do with if the country cares or not. India clearly doesn't. I partly agree your views that performance at global events depends a lot on how much priority and importance a particular society (and hence it's government) gives to sports. But money does matter a lot. Countries who are doing well in global sports arena, either have a very strong government sponsored program (e.g. China) or solid private backing (USA?). It does take a lot of investment to churn out superstar sport-persons. Till now sports was not on the highest priority list here, and add to that pains of a huge developing nation, the state sponsored program is just for namesake. Interestingly the first individual gold medal winner (in shooting) for India, comes from a very affluent family, and even has his own private shooting range. Once more money, and more 'focus' comes in, things would definitely change.
aggieben 18y ago
I wonder if there's are some correlations to be found that might not jump out from these numbers, like medals won vs. # distance from home country to hosting country # similarity of hosting country's culture to home country I'd also like to know how many medals were won by NCAA or American professional league athletes representing other countries (Usain Bolt, for example).
- Locke 18y ago
  While a lot of athletes from around the world attend college / compete in the US, Usain Bolt isn't a good example. I seem to remember one of the commentators saying that a lot of the sprinters from Jamaica (and the Caribbean in general) are somewhat unique for having not come to the US. Usain Bolt's wikipedia page doesn't have him spending any time in the US: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usain_Bolt http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usain_Bolt
  - aggieben 18y ago
    I seem to recall one of the NBC commentators saying that Bolt attended college in the U.S. and competed in the NCAA. I don't follow track at all, so I had no internal fact-check for knowing any better. My mistake if I was wrong.
    - seano 18y ago
      He turned down the offer of a US scholarship to train in Jamaica.
- graywh 18y ago
  The NYTimes has an interactive map on the website showing medal counts by country for each Olympic games. http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2008/08/04/sports/olympics/20080804_MEDALCOUNT_MAP.html http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2008/08/04/sports/olympic...
brk 18y ago
I didn't really see anything of value in this dataset. What I found more interesting is that someone took the time to put it all together in the first place. At the risk of sounding overly negative, I don't really get what the hype about the Olympics, or professional sports is all about. People seem to put a lot of time/effort into watching, tracking, following various sports, but I don't see what the benefit is to being a rabid spectator. It's not like more gold medals == some improvement to society or economy. Same thing when one random sports team bests another in some championship or tournament, no measurable increase (save for the increased revenue to sports paraphernalia dealers).
- huherto 18y ago
  I think athletes show us great human traits like discipline, and hard work that inspire the rest of us.
- jimbokun 18y ago
  Can't you say the same thing for most arts and entertainments? Not much "practical" benefit to be had, but that's kind of the point of a diversion.
  - brk 18y ago
    You can, and at the risk of sounding even more negative, I don't follow "celebrity stats" much either. However, I don't see people walking around with hats and jerseys with their favorite actors name on it the way you do for sports. I do enjoy many mainstream forms of entertainment (TV, music, movies, etc) I just don't obsess over the smallest details of the entertainers, awards they have won, etc. From my perspective, I would rather take credit for something I have personally done (alone or as part of a team).
    - aggieben 18y ago
      However, I don't see people walking around with hats and jerseys with their favorite actors name on it the way you do for sports. Yes. Yes you do. How many clothing lines exist solely because of some celebrity? Examples here: http://fashion.about.com/cs/celebritystyle/a/celebritylines.htm http://fashion.about.com/cs/celebritystyle/a/celebritylines..... The difference is that the vapid celebrity culture is even more imitated than sports stars, but for even less apparent reasons. At least sports starts have accomplished something, even if it is ultimately not terribly meaningful.
deleted 18y ago
[deleted]
dpatru 18y ago
Zimbabwe, with GDP 0, is first for medals per GDP. One of the few benefits of living under Mugabe.
- jfarmer 18y ago
  Infinity points!
  - hsuresh 18y ago
    Not infinity. It is undefined. :)
    - jfarmer 18y ago
      I work in projective space.
geebee 18y ago
Does a team event count as only a single medal? For instance, does the US get only one single gold for the men's basketball team, or do they award one for each player on the team? I think in the official count it's just one, but I'm not sure. Anyway, the IOC's official line is that they don't recognize medal counts for nations, they just provide data - competition is between individuals, even if they do represent countries. While that may seem like a bit of a cop-out, it does make sense. I'm not even sure you can really compare medal counts between individuals in different sports, because the number of related events differs in each category. It's entertaining to think about in a water-cooler sort of way, but otherwise, you can only get a very rough sense of a country's devotion to sport. Sure, a medal count close to zero for a large country might indicate this - but even then, it's not like there's olympic cricket, is there? If there were, and it was only worth one medal for the entire thing, I think most of India would happily trade first place in the medal count for one gold in cricket ;)
- a-priori 18y ago
  In general, medals from team events are counted per team, not per individual.
- krschultz 18y ago
  Correct each team only counts as one medal. You are right there is no correlation. Being insanely dominant in a sport like basketball yields two medals (men & womens). Being insanely dominant in swimming yields medals for men and womens, multiple positions on the podium, multiple events, etc. No matter how great of a volleyball player you are, you can only earn one medal. So countries that focus on certain areas (track/field, swimming, diving, gymnastics) get a lot more than those that focus on team sports.
zandorg 18y ago
How about medals per incarcerated convict?
KevBurnsJr 18y ago
India not lookin so hot.

39 points by aggieben 18y ago

ars 18y ago

It's interesting but I can not find any correlation at all. So I'd guess the conclusion is that olympic medals have nothing to do with population size or money. Instead it has everything to do with if the country cares or not. India clearly doesn't.

deleted 18y ago
[deleted]
ajross 18y ago
There's a slight anti-correlation with population size. Large nations with conventionally "successful" olympic programs (USA, China, Russia) are well below median in medals per capita. My guess is that this is because there's an upper limit on entrants. The USA and China might be much more likely to get medals, but they're still limited to three per event at maximum. There might be events where a big nation (China and diving comes to mind) might be able to get even more medals, but can't because they only have so many slots.
- timr 18y ago
  That's the noise you'd expect from a random process. Any country with an Olympic program has some chance of earning a medal. Thus, given a sufficiently large number of small countries, you'd expect that a random subset of those nations would earn a higher number of medals per capita than the big players. That Jamaica is at the top of the list is a decent example -- without the unexpected, astronomical weirdness of Usain Bolt, they'd have half as many golds. The larger programs have a greater number of chances to win, but normalizing by GDP or national population doesn't tell you anything about the overall probability of an athlete from country X winning a medal (which is arguably what you want to know). To get that information, you'd have to normalize by something else -- like size of team, or program expenditure, or some factor that's more directly related to athletics than GDP or population.
  - dejb 18y ago
    Yes I agree. To make the list statistically valid you should probably only look at those countries with more than say 15 or 20 medals. I wonder who comes out on top then? :)
    - whatusername 18y ago
      More than 15 total medals. Looking at GDP per Medal. * Cuba ------- 1,879 * Belarus ------- 2,038 * Ukraine ------- 5,204 * Russia ------- 17,861 * Australia ------- 19,341 * South Korea ------- 31,674 * China ------- 32,990 * Netherlands ------- 47,181 * Great Britain ------- 59,000 * France ------- 62,875 * Italy ------- 73,857 * Canada ------- 78,111 * Spain ------- 78,611 * Germany ------- 79,488 * United States ------- 125,364 * Japan ------- 173,840 Who were expecting on top?
      - timr 18y ago
        Tough to say. What this (perhaps) suggests is that there are more good athletes per capita in Cuba than in Japan. But there are a lot of confounding factors, so I wouldn't read too much into it. For example, one needs to consider the amount of money invested into training and selection of athletes. The US is somewhat lackadaisical about selecting athletes at a young age, whereas the eastern bloc countries tend to be a bit more motivated....
      - dejb 18y ago
        I suspect you are deliberately missing the point for the purposes of mischief. I was talking about the population ones which would go like this Population Gold * Australia ---- 1,528,165 * Netherlands ---- 2,349,286 * Belarus ---- 2,422,500 * Great Britain ----- 3,052,632 * South Korea ----- 3,709,538 Population Medals * Australia ----- 465,094 * Cuba ------ 469,500 * Belarus ----- 510,000 Huge Gap .... * Netherlands ----- 1,027,813 Anything stand out to you about these? :)
        whatusername 18y ago
        To be honest - I was trying to prove that point with the GDP figures.. (but the pesky actual data got in the way)... Good to see that Population proves it out though!
ericwan 18y ago
an interesting factor to see might be whether they're communist or the pro-West before the end of cold war.
ad 18y ago
The best I could do was an "authoritarian index", using the (GDP / Population) / Gold Medals and Total Medals. If you rank them by that, you see some pretty nasty countries near the top, and nice countries near the bottom. Zimbabwe, North Korea and China round out the top three... Ethiopia is ok but does lack freedom of the press, etc. Then look at the bottom of the list: all free market, liberal democracies. Finland, Belgium,etc, Bahrain, arguably the most democratic country in the Gulf, Slovenia, etc, on the way up. There are statistical blips of course. Jamaica is near the top because they are just that aweseome. Also, I just made this up so it's probably completely wrong. To put forth the very rough and completely unscientific theory: A more authoritarian country is willing to put in more effort, per dollar of GDP and amount of population, to get gold medals. They've got more to prove.
luckystrike 18y ago
So I'd guess the conclusion is that olympic medals have nothing to do with population size or money. Instead it has everything to do with if the country cares or not. India clearly doesn't. I partly agree your views that performance at global events depends a lot on how much priority and importance a particular society (and hence it's government) gives to sports. But money does matter a lot. Countries who are doing well in global sports arena, either have a very strong government sponsored program (e.g. China) or solid private backing (USA?). It does take a lot of investment to churn out superstar sport-persons. Till now sports was not on the highest priority list here, and add to that pains of a huge developing nation, the state sponsored program is just for namesake. Interestingly the first individual gold medal winner (in shooting) for India, comes from a very affluent family, and even has his own private shooting range. Once more money, and more 'focus' comes in, things would definitely change.

aggieben 18y ago

I wonder if there's are some correlations to be found that might not jump out from these numbers, like medals won vs. # distance from home country to hosting country # similarity of hosting country's culture to home country I'd also like to know how many medals were won by NCAA or American professional league athletes representing other countries (Usain Bolt, for example).

Locke 18y ago
While a lot of athletes from around the world attend college / compete in the US, Usain Bolt isn't a good example. I seem to remember one of the commentators saying that a lot of the sprinters from Jamaica (and the Caribbean in general) are somewhat unique for having not come to the US. Usain Bolt's wikipedia page doesn't have him spending any time in the US: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usain_Bolt http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usain_Bolt
- aggieben 18y ago
  I seem to recall one of the NBC commentators saying that Bolt attended college in the U.S. and competed in the NCAA. I don't follow track at all, so I had no internal fact-check for knowing any better. My mistake if I was wrong.
  - seano 18y ago
    He turned down the offer of a US scholarship to train in Jamaica.
graywh 18y ago
The NYTimes has an interactive map on the website showing medal counts by country for each Olympic games. http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2008/08/04/sports/olympics/20080804_MEDALCOUNT_MAP.html http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2008/08/04/sports/olympic...

brk 18y ago

I didn't really see anything of value in this dataset. What I found more interesting is that someone took the time to put it all together in the first place. At the risk of sounding overly negative, I don't really get what the hype about the Olympics, or professional sports is all about. People seem to put a lot of time/effort into watching, tracking, following various sports, but I don't see what the benefit is to being a rabid spectator. It's not like more gold medals == some improvement to society or economy. Same thing when one random sports team bests another in some championship or tournament, no measurable increase (save for the increased revenue to sports paraphernalia dealers).

huherto 18y ago
I think athletes show us great human traits like discipline, and hard work that inspire the rest of us.
jimbokun 18y ago
Can't you say the same thing for most arts and entertainments? Not much "practical" benefit to be had, but that's kind of the point of a diversion.
- brk 18y ago
  You can, and at the risk of sounding even more negative, I don't follow "celebrity stats" much either. However, I don't see people walking around with hats and jerseys with their favorite actors name on it the way you do for sports. I do enjoy many mainstream forms of entertainment (TV, music, movies, etc) I just don't obsess over the smallest details of the entertainers, awards they have won, etc. From my perspective, I would rather take credit for something I have personally done (alone or as part of a team).
  - aggieben 18y ago
    However, I don't see people walking around with hats and jerseys with their favorite actors name on it the way you do for sports. Yes. Yes you do. How many clothing lines exist solely because of some celebrity? Examples here: http://fashion.about.com/cs/celebritystyle/a/celebritylines.htm http://fashion.about.com/cs/celebritystyle/a/celebritylines..... The difference is that the vapid celebrity culture is even more imitated than sports stars, but for even less apparent reasons. At least sports starts have accomplished something, even if it is ultimately not terribly meaningful.

deleted 18y ago

[deleted]

dpatru 18y ago

Zimbabwe, with GDP 0, is first for medals per GDP. One of the few benefits of living under Mugabe.

jfarmer 18y ago
Infinity points!
- hsuresh 18y ago
  Not infinity. It is undefined. :)
  - jfarmer 18y ago
    I work in projective space.

geebee 18y ago

Does a team event count as only a single medal? For instance, does the US get only one single gold for the men's basketball team, or do they award one for each player on the team? I think in the official count it's just one, but I'm not sure. Anyway, the IOC's official line is that they don't recognize medal counts for nations, they just provide data - competition is between individuals, even if they do represent countries. While that may seem like a bit of a cop-out, it does make sense. I'm not even sure you can really compare medal counts between individuals in different sports, because the number of related events differs in each category. It's entertaining to think about in a water-cooler sort of way, but otherwise, you can only get a very rough sense of a country's devotion to sport. Sure, a medal count close to zero for a large country might indicate this - but even then, it's not like there's olympic cricket, is there? If there were, and it was only worth one medal for the entire thing, I think most of India would happily trade first place in the medal count for one gold in cricket ;)

a-priori 18y ago
In general, medals from team events are counted per team, not per individual.
krschultz 18y ago
Correct each team only counts as one medal. You are right there is no correlation. Being insanely dominant in a sport like basketball yields two medals (men & womens). Being insanely dominant in swimming yields medals for men and womens, multiple positions on the podium, multiple events, etc. No matter how great of a volleyball player you are, you can only earn one medal. So countries that focus on certain areas (track/field, swimming, diving, gymnastics) get a lot more than those that focus on team sports.

zandorg 18y ago

How about medals per incarcerated convict?

KevBurnsJr 18y ago

India not lookin so hot.