Meddling with Medals

[steepholm]

I thought it might be fun to look at the Olympic gold medal table, adjusted for things that (one might expect) would make a big difference to the number of golds a nation is likely to win - namely, population and GDP. After all, the bigger the population, the more chance of its containing a winner; and the richer the country, the more resources it can throw at things like training facilities. Because I'm lazy, I've only used the top ten countries in the medal table as of this afternoon.



The UK does okay on all three charts, but the Netherlands is the unexpected star of the show. And oh dear, China.

Comments

[heliopausa.livejournal.com]

It's telling which countries win in which sports, too - you need a fair amount of wealth/ocean/leisure to train for the sailing events, say, but only weights and a coach to train for weight-lifting, and only mats and a coach and opponents to train for judo.

[steepholm.livejournal.com]

A very good point! And running is cheaper still. I leave it to cleverer statisticians than I to crunch the numbers.