Everyone counts Olympic medals by country, but I think it should be done per capita (that is, we should take into account the population of the country, by dividing the number of medals won by the total population). Here's the most-medaled 20 countries expressed on the basis of medals per million people.
By this measure, Canada did better than China, the United States, or the Russian Federation (the top three countries by number of medals)....but Jamaica comes out far and away the best.
An even better measure might be medal winners per capita: that is, we shouldn't count multiple medal winners more than once. However, that would be a pain to calculate. It is also not clear how to deal appropriately with team sports, where you get a lot of medalists but only one medal counted.
Medal count came from here. Populations came from here.
Update: It has been pointed out to me that the Bahamas actually has a higher per capita medal count than Jamaica, which I missed because they actually had very few medals. They got 2 medals, but got them from a population of just 331,000, for a medal per million score of 6.04.
A commentator pointed out this nice website that graphs medals per million citizens, among other relations.
1 comment:
Nice table.
I found this widget that displays who won the 2008 Olympics from different perspectives.
It displays medals won by total medal count and gold count.
In addition it can show medals won per million inhabitant and per million dollar GDP.
I think you might like it:-)
http://www.youcalc.com/apps/1219403616554?application_popup=1
It's free and easy to embed
A straight medal count isn’t necessarily the most fair:-)
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