Just had to reblog this - one of the coolest visualizations I’ve seen for a while:

2008 US Movie Box Office visualization by Zach Beane

(via swissmiss via GenPink)

The 2008 Beijing Olympics has just finished. So who did the best?

Well if you believe NBCOlympics, it’s the US with 110 medals.

But that’s absurd, right? China won almost everything, achieving 51 gold medals to just 36 by the States.

If we count a gold medal as three points, silver as two and bronze as one, we have China with 223 points just scraping past the US with 220.

Though if you ask me, you should not only weight medals by value, but also normalize according to population and GDP. When you do so, you see the Bahamas had the greatest success at the Beijing Olympics with an impressive 1267.2 points per million people per trillion dollars GDP! By that standard, the US comes in at 83 out of 88 medal-winning countries and China at 86!

I threw together a bit of actionscript so you can see how the rankings move around with this normalization (if you are using a feed reader you will need to click through):

Some interesting results, yes? Bahamas clearly ahead. Caribbean countries and Western Ex-Soviet Republics very well represented (for obvious reasons really). Australia high once again on the population-normalized chart but dropping away when GDP is considered.

A note on units:

When normalized by population, you are seeing the number of medals or points per million in population. When normalized by GDP, it is the number of medals or points per trillion dollars of GDP (not GDP per capita). So with both selected, we have medals or points per million people per trillion dollars of GDP.

Hope you enjoy!

Oh and if you want to do your own work on this, feel free to download the xml file I used.

UPDATE: Graham points out that some of the text is disappearing in IE7. If this is the case for you, try looking at the table in isolation.

If the real measure of Olympic success is the number of medals won per capita, then this is the table we should be following. Australia is conspicuously absent at the moment, but that should be rectified soon if the Athens and Sydney performances are anything to go by.

Some more Olympic medal statistical goodness:

• Visualisation of population-adjusted performance from Athens (not weighted by medal-type)
• Athens medal performance weighted by GDP
• The beautiful NYT animated visualisation of medals won over time

Enjoy!