A fair Olympic medal tally - normalized by population and GDP
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.
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August 25th, 2008 at 1:51 amhttp://lvb.net/item/6522
Cool analysis. I too believe that medal importance calculation ought to be used instead of total medals tally if not number of golds. Can you divide the medal importance value by number of athletes fielded by each country to see if the tally changes? This might prevent countries which bring/field large contingents in order to win more medals (a proven direct correlation)
August 25th, 2008 at 1:59 amgood stuff. check out this interactive chart widget - it does the mathematics and draws a chart of your data for you: http://www.youcalc.com/apps/1219242654520
August 25th, 2008 at 4:08 am@ Rudi - Thanks for the link. Not too sure of the medals per athlete medals per athlete calculation though - as you can see it’s giving undue weight to teams which focus on individual sports.
@Patrix - I’m not sure whether dividing by number of athletes fielded will give you a meaningful result. Though if you are interested, there’s some analysis in the link that Rudi provided. Why is it not meaningful? Firstly the ability to send athletes is already covered somewhat in the population and GDP calculations. Secondly, where a team of X players is successful, this would be treated as one athlete among X being successful, which is clearly a misrepresentation.
@roger - Thanks for the link. Nice to get some visualization happening, but would have liked to do that for weighted medals, considering both population and GDP together.
August 25th, 2008 at 8:53 amWhere is Australia?
August 25th, 2008 at 10:39 am@ Chris - I have Aus at 6 by population and 36 by population and GDP. You can click the checkboxes at the bottom of the list to play around with the options.
August 25th, 2008 at 4:51 pmwhere is israel?????
August 25th, 2008 at 5:21 pm[...] I was going to run the analysis after the Games concluded thanks to the data available at Swivel, Ozan Onay had already done an excellent job and I’m reproducing his table(s) [...]
August 26th, 2008 at 1:39 amOzan - great work, the table’s nice, but as I view it (IE7) the table, in the page, trims a bit off the list - so with all normalisations, the columns run: 1-10; 11-34; 37-60; 63-87. I’ve “lost” 35, 36, 61, 62 and 88… I think Australia is in there somewhere.
September 2nd, 2008 at 1:20 amWorks OK as an isolated ‘table’ (I went straight to /toys/tally/tally.swf) but not in the page - font and/or box-size problem?
@ Graham - Thanks for pointing that out! I’ll see what I can do about fixing it. Strange that it would work directly in the browser, but not embedded in the post.
@ Igal - Israel comes in at 61. It’s getting cut out as Graham mentioned.
September 2nd, 2008 at 8:35 pm