Olympic Medal Count, Adjusted for Population and GDP

http://www.symworld.com/medals/index.php?sort=gold

by aggieben • 18 years ago

39 41 18 years ago

ars• 18 years 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.

ajross• 18 years 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.

timr2• 18 years 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.

ericwan• 18 years ago

an interesting factor to see might be whether they're communist or the pro-West before the end of cold war.

ad• 18 years 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• 18 years 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.

aggieben3• 18 years 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).

Locke2• 18 years 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

aggieben3• 18 years 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.

graywh• 18 years 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/olympic...

brk6• 18 years 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).

jimbokun• 18 years 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.

brk6• 18 years 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).

huherto• 18 years ago

I think athletes show us great human traits like discipline, and hard work that inspire the rest of us.

mynameishere• 18 years ago

Well, athletics are a sort of "apex activity". That is, a lot of resources are devoted to them as a goal, rather than they themselves producing resources.

I don't like sports, but usually watch the Olympics if I can. Humans have a 1000 or so physical characteristics, and it's interesting to see their upper limits approached.

Locke2• 18 years ago

This is an interesting view point for someone on Hacker News, considering the way we follow tech startups here...

I'm a lifelong sports fan. Only in my mid 20's did I start becoming interested in business. One of the first things I noticed is how similar the business page is to the sports page. People follow companies like they're sports teams, gathering detailed statistics (profit, market cap, etc), analyzing match-ups (Microsoft vs Yahoo), discussing all-stars (Steve Jobs), etc.

Techcrunch is our Sports Illustrated.

brk6• 18 years ago

I am on HN because I am an active hacker and startup junkie. I might have similar feelings about the Olympics and professional sports if I participated in those activities AND could draw useful data to help my personal endeavors.

Being that an in depth knowledge of football and related player stats gives me no benefit or edge in my pursuits, I choose not to dedicate time that could be better spent actively doing or learning on spectating.

mechanical_fish• 18 years ago

I don't see what the benefit is to being a rabid spectator

It gives you something to talk about besides the weather. That's a huge part of the draw. If it weren't for sports, what would you do as you sat around drinking in a bar with your friends?

Also: Athletic people are fun to look at. And sports offer a nice balance between the predictable results of hours of practice and careful strategic planning (everyone loves it when a plan comes together) and the drama that arises from random factors (as Yogi Berra supposedly said, "it isn't over until it's over").

brk6• 18 years ago

Usually when sitting around drinking with my friends we end up talking about things like startup cultures, robotics, home automation, guiter-effects-pedal hacking, economies/investments, business operations, business ideas, religions, etc.

FWIW, my friends cover a fairly wide variety of demographics, they are not all geeks or startup people, but they all have the ability to discuss things they are actively involved in in one way or another.

dejb3• 18 years ago

Many people find that physical endevour is an inherent part of being human. Watching the best people compete in sports provides an important perspective on the human condition. When the world comes together to do this it can be a celebration on this aspect of humanity.

whatusername3• 18 years ago

I thought I would be a smart-ass and re-create this data in Google Spreadsheet using GoogleLookup.. Should be great for this kind of thing.

2 minutes to get the medal tally, clean it up in excel and format out the country titles correct.

1 minute to Paste in Goog spreadsheet, setup GoogleLookup queries on each country for GDP / Pop.

2 minutes to fix up the 5 or so countries that it didn't recognise - Korea --> South Korea, Russian Federation --> Russia, Dominican Rep. --> Dominican Republic

And then I looked closely at the data Google pulled back...

China: * GDP: - "$10 trillion (2006 est.) (purchasing power parity)", * Population: - "1,313,973,713 (July 2006 est.)"

USA: * GDP: - "2006 estimate" * Population - "31/km² (172nd)" (A few other countries had similar results)

(Sure, it probably just means that wikipedia is formatted differently for some countries, but it ruined my efforts.. Even so - I still got 95% of the data within about 5 minutes, and links to wikipedia pages that probably contained the rest..)

--- And with a bit more digging it seems that Google is just getting the figures wrong from wikipedia.. Lots of the countries came from the CIA World fact book - that had the correct numbers in GSpreadsheet; but if it goes to Wikipedia it seems to grab the Pop. Density and not the Pop.

Dear Google - please fix your scraper. :)

dpatru• 18 years ago

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

jfarmer2• 18 years ago

Infinity points!

hsuresh• 18 years ago

Not infinity. It is undefined. :)

geebee• 18 years 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• 18 years ago

In general, medals from team events are counted per team, not per individual.

krschultz3• 18 years 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• 18 years ago

How about medals per incarcerated convict?

KevBurnsJr• 18 years ago

India not lookin so hot.

Olympic Medal Count, Adjusted for Population and GDP

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