












Begging the ?

Why is country size exogenous?



Here are several other medals tables, which are adjusted by many of the metrics proposed above. For example if you adjust to billion dollars of GDP per medal, then North Korea actually comes out on top.


Is it a problem that we are only including countries that won medals? Maybe we should be looking at all countries that competed or all countries in the world?


Good point. Consider Pakistan and Bangladesh (each with population > 160 million), which won a grand total of 0 medals. In fact, Bangladesh has never won an Olympic medal.

I wrote an article a few days ago based on a similar idea (although not on my own blog; it was a guest post elsewhere), but with a slightly different purpose:


Nick Nolan

There was 302 gold medals given in olympics. China has population 1,322 million people (2007 est.) If China had taken all gold medals, it would be only 0.23 medals per million people.


Don't forget that Australia came 6th overall, the only country for which the /capita, /USD GDP and actual medal tally are pretty close!


Americans dominate the sports that pay real money. If track and water polo offered salaries in the 10's of millions, we would dominate that too.


In the end, I think almost everyone agrees on two main issues: (1) Using an Olympic medal count (gold or otherwise) as an indicator of a nation's athletic talent is horribly flawed and (2) we all wish our respective home nations received more medals.

I mean, who are we kidding? Michael Phelps produced gold medal after gold medal for the United States, but each medal was produced entirely within the pool. I do not want to take anything away from *his* outstanding achievements, but what would it mean for the total US tally if he did not compete, or if only one medal were given for his overall swimming speed (a swimming decathlon of sorts)? Or what if Bolt had torn his Achilles tendon prior to his first run, or if every Ping Pong event was removed from the Olympics due to an increase in focusing drugs... I think you see where I am going.

In the end, every nation wants to produce as many medals as it can in very much the same way that every nation wishes to produce the best national economy that it can. But as with the national economy, no single equation tells even one sentence of the entire story.

Winning 51 gold medals will not put more food in the mouths of the millions still impoverished in China anymore than it should be considered a shameful performance in light of the nation's 1.3 billion citizens. At best, all a high gold medal tally indicates is that for a few weeks out of this year, Chinese food will taste just tad bit sweeter for 1.3 billion people. Manufacturing a horribly flawed "golds per million" analysis will do nothing to change that and honestly, I don't see why it should.



As an Australian I'm bursting with pride that we've somehow managed to force Kiwi sheep jokes into the world's economic consciousness.


Don't you all realise that calling football 'soccer' to a Brit is the most annoying thing you could ever say? (:

Julian Togelius

By the same measure, the European Union taken as a unit is much better than both China and the US in "transforming raw talent into world champion material". See:



I agree with Hughes that medals per dollar spent on athletes is definitely a better measure - if you are interested in how efficient countries are in transforming sporting talents.

But I don't think Olympics is about victory in per capita, per GPD, or per dollar spent on athletes terms. At the end of the day, the gold medal is awarded to the fastest man, not the fastest man per amount of time/money spent on training. In sports, execuses are for losers.


From an 'international' perspective, I think it is amusing that instead of responding to the data in question, some question the legitimacy of the claim and then trying to find a measure by which the USA heads the table...


Sorry, but you need to factor in an adjustment factor for the rigor of drug testing in each country. My daughter is an Olympic hopeful, and the level of scrutiny is pretty daunting in the US of A even in high school. How rigorous is it in other, less wealthy, less high-profile countries? I hope Bolt and his peers turn out to be clean because they are awesome, but his behavior makes me wonder.

Keivn H

whenever you are dealing with the top .0001% you are going to run into a huge amount of variance. Obviously that variance is going to make small countries stand out. There a lot more small countries than large countries.

In order to deal with that variance, you'd probably need to take a number of uncorrelated samples. Because an athlete seems to have 2-3 olympic games in them, you'd probably need to average over at least 10-15 games to get a reasonable estimate of the signal in the noise.

Mr Kid

Shouldn't we also factor individual medals vs. team medals? It's much easier for a country to produce a gold medal in a track event than in basketball, soccer or water polo. Shouldn't a basketball gold medal be worth 12 (# on the roster), or at least 5 (number on the court) times more than the 100m gold?


Surely you should rank them in Gold Medals/GDP per head of capita?


Good call, DG.

One factor - which may be due to the presence of so many professional leagues in North America - is that kids in sports tend to be specialized early. Those who are tall at 10 are told that they should play basketball, and not only that, they should be a forward. Those that are big are told that they're linemen, etc.

In most countries, as far as I'm aware, kids spend more time just generally playing and running around. This means that as they and grow they become athletes with a well-rounded set of skills which they can apply to the sports to which they're suited as teenagers. The 10-year-old power forward who is the same height at 16 is screwed if parents and coaches have been specializing him in one position before it was too early to tell how he'd be as an adult. The same goes for the lineman who has a growth spurt and ends up skinny. How much of a difference does this make? Of course I don't know, it's just a tendency I noticed and have heard repeated by many others, which may be relevant.



Regardless of how populous a country is, there is a finite number of medals available.

There are 302 possible medals. Using a rough estimate of U.S. population, even if the U.S. won EVERY gold, their maximum statistic would be 1 gold per million.

So the limiting factors aren't just athletic ability and training- they also include possible medals and total population.


It’s a bit of an exaggeration to say that ‘America is terrible at transforming raw talent’.

Look at the number of Olympians and world-class athletes that train with American coaches and American university teams for most of the year. One can’t underestimate the importance of foreign athletes receiving college scholarships in the US. Those athletes come to America to train with the best and be trained by the best, typically garnering all sorts of college accolades. They return to their home countries well coached and ready to emerge onto the international scene for their homeland. This speaks to the development programs in the United States; simply brushing them off as ineffective is an empty statement.

One glaring example is Richard Thompson, the Olympic silver medalist in the 100m, a 4-year track star for LSU and citizen of Trinidad and Tobago.

Others include: Milorad Cavic (the guy who nearly out-touched our beloved Phelps in the butterfly), Kirsty Coventry…