The final hurdle has been hurdled and the cleaners are sweeping away the last of the closing ceremony debris and we see that the top sporting nation is the USA, followed by China and Great Britain. Well done ladies and gentleman, let's all go off to share a cheeseburger, a cup of tea and a bowl of rice to celebrate how awesome we are.
Hang on though, don't grill that burger just yet because China and the USA are the first and third most populace countries on the planet so of course they should win more medals than most of the other nations, so how about if we find the winners by breaking it down by medals won by population.
If we do it that way the winner is Grenada with the Bahamas and New Zealand completing the top three. Great Britain would be 10th, Russia 25th, USA 28th and China 47th.
So there we go , Grenada, the Bahamas and New Zealand are the global superstars but then that still doesn't seem fair because obviously richer countries spend more on facilities, training and equipment so if we break it down per GDP of each country, we get Grenada, Jamaica and the North Koreans making up the top three. Great Britain is 22nd, Russia 26th, China 42nd and USA 43rd.
Before we don Kim Jong Un masks and put on the reggae records, how about the size of the team each country sent to London?
Based on the number of athletes per medal, the Champions are China who sent 396 athletes and needed just 4.5 athletes to win a medal of any colour and 10 to win each of its golds. The USA came second with their team of 530 athletes needing 12 for each gold and 5.1 athletes for all medals.
Third are the 410-strong Australian squad who required 12 athletes for a medal, and 59 athletes for each gold medal.
I'm sure that each country will try to interpret the results differently to come up with a formulae that proves that they actually came out of the Olympics very well but for now i will stay with the proper, unadjusted Medal Table so GB will fire up that barbecue and China your job is to not let America anywhere near the CD Player unless you want another hour of listening to Billy Ray Bob and his pick up truck blues.
ha ha ha,
ReplyDeletei was gonna suggest you calculate medals/capita but thought it was too much work to dump on someone...
i was thinking the english and russians would be in the top 5. how does it look if you set a minimum population of say 25 million people in the nation?
q
I take no credit for the maths q, i took the alternative tables from a number of sources. It amused me how the table can be read by countries that at first glance did not do very well but actually, if you tweak the table for gdp/team numbers/population etc, most did very well.
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