

Show HN: Olympics Ranking Adjusted by Population (Evening Project) - pykello
http://moshayedi.net/london2012/

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nopinsight
This is not an entirely fair comparison. Each nation has a quota of the number
of athletes for each sport it can send to the Olympics.

For example, in swimming, only two participants per nation are allowed. Some
of the swimmers who got the 3rd place in US National Trials could even win
bronze, but they cannot participate.

More often the case, there is only one national team allowed for a relay or
team event. So even if China has 300 times the population of New Zealand, it
can send the same number of teams and is limited to a maximum of one medal per
event.

The methodology is biased against larger nations with a good pool of athletes.

~~~
JackWebbHeller
> _For example, in swimming, only two participants per nation are allowed._

Really?
[http://www.usaswimming.org/ViewNewsArticle.aspx?TabId=0&...](http://www.usaswimming.org/ViewNewsArticle.aspx?TabId=0&itemid=4537&mid=8712)

~~~
nl
Yes, really.

I'm from Australia, and we have the same issue. The Jamacians have a similar
issue in the sprints (I think you can enter 3 per event there).

I'm not sure what you think that shows - perhaps you are missing that there
are many different swimming events?

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pavs
For me India is the biggest disappointment of them all. They promoted the hell
out of Indian athletes in Olympics before the games. They also consider China
to be their biggest competition in every level (economy/military/living
standard).

Whenever I try to get in to discussion with my Indian friends in the most
respectful manner and try to tell them China is several orders of magnitude
ahead of India in most things; I get ridiculed or brushed aside.

I have found that there are two things you can never reason with, religion and
nationalism.

~~~
gnufied
May be you have met wrong sort of Indians (nationalistic) ? I along with
nearly everyone I know - understands that India is far behind China. We truly
suck as society. Rate badly on corruption, infrastructure, women, minority
rights.

There is nothing to defend.

~~~
keithpeter
Largest democracy? Governments can change without wars/madness.

Forward drive? At least the Indian nationals I meet in UK. Bags of self
confidence and focus.

~~~
pavs
India has a lot of things to be proud of. There is no doubt about that. But I
am not a fan of "largest democracy" as something of an accomplishment. I
always interpret it as "a democratic country with a serious population
problem".

~~~
eru
The population density (according to duckduckgo) of India is about the same as
the English one. England is doing fine, though perhaps getting a bit too old.

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gnufied
In India - it is just not possible to make a living out of athletics. It is
largely true and partly just a perception problem. The only sport where you
can make a comfortable living is basically Cricket and thats about it.

I know few of my friends who were state/national level table tennis and
Badminton players but decided to let that thing go and opted for engineering
degree because of pressure from parents etc.

Heck, I along with my friend are running a startup and one of the things my
friend's dad asked is - "who will marry their daughter to you?". And this was
for a brilliant embedded programmer who quit his regular to do this thing.

I can't imagine hardship (and hilarity) involved in finding prospective
bride/groom for someone who "runs" for living. This thing is a no go clearly
in Indian society.

~~~
eoin_murphy
It seems to me as an outsider as well that any kind of physical activity is
generally looked down. Not absolutely but more in a 'if you don't have to, why
would you' way.

Plus, it's so hot most of the time that any serious aerobic activity is
difficult to maintain.

~~~
gnufied
It is not about climate or heat. More :

[http://blogs.wsj.com/india-chief-mentor/2010/02/16/indian-
en...](http://blogs.wsj.com/india-chief-mentor/2010/02/16/indian-
entrepreneurs-need-a-hug-google%E2%80%99s-gandhi/)

I believe deep down Indians being bad in athletics is similar to being a
entrepreneur is hard in India. The reason is - individual freedom or
individual decision making has never been our strong point. So, the one who
walks off the beaten path is always unfairly judged by the society. Sure,
those who succeed on this path are worshipped like gods here, but when you are
starting small, you are up against huge odds. And it starts from your family.
It is hard work.

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earnubs
The Guardian have one of these too, with a link to download the data:
[http://www.guardian.co.uk/sport/datablog/interactive/2012/au...](http://www.guardian.co.uk/sport/datablog/interactive/2012/aug/07/olympics-2012-alternative-
medal-table-visualised)

~~~
earnubs
The NYTimes have something similar too:
[http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2012/08/07/sports/olympic...](http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2012/08/07/sports/olympics/the-
best-and-worst-countries-in-the-medal-count.html)

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monkeypizza
How about a weighing based on how many people play that sport (weekly, say)?
And if one sport has many types of race, just divide up the new medal weight
by how many events there are.

So if 50 million people play basketball per week and 1 million people swim,
and if there is 1 basketball medal and 10 swimming medals, then a basketball
medal would be valued at 50*10 of a swimming medal.

This way, new events & sports could be added easily, without changing things
much. This would also reduce the bickering that happens whenever someone
proposes adding or removing an event.

~~~
eru
But then you have bickering over what you classify together as types. E.g.
does diving belong to swimming? Hurdling together with marathons?

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aerique
Nitpick: the official name for "Holland" is (The) Netherlands.

Holland actually denotes only a part of the country and a lot of dutchmen do
not take kindly to being called a "Hollander".

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holland>

~~~
Someone
Nitpick++: the Netherlands is/are not taking part in the olympics; the kingdom
of the Netherlands is
(<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kingdom_of_the_Netherlands>)

Also: even London2012.com calls the home nation Great Britain, not the United
Kingdom.

~~~
eru
If you are nitpicking about the names of states, you'd probably also have to
call Germany the Federal Republic of Germany. And lots of other countries have
more formal names, too.

~~~
Someone
Firstly, it wasn't clear, but I intended to nitpick the nitpicker.

Secondly, there is a difference. Nowadays, there is only one Germany, so there
is no need for clarification. However, people would be offended if someone
called it Bayern or Saxony. It surprises me that the team is called GB, given
the well-known and IMO better alternative "UK".

Also, the announcers at the Olympics say "the kingdom of the Netherlands". I
do not think they do that for e.g. Belgium.

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andrewfelix
Would be interesting to see it adjusted for GDP and/or sport budgets per
capita. In Australia we invest a lot of money in our sporting programs
relative to our population size.

~~~
pykello
Thanks for the idea, here it is: <http://moshayedi.net/london2012/ranking-
gdp.html>

~~~
adaml_623
You need units on that there table. Is GDP '000,000s of USD?

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dym
Here's a site with more information and better presentation:
<http://www.medalspercapita.com/>

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nodata
Already done here: <http://www.medalspercapita.com/#weighted-per-capita:2012>

and has more options too:

* per GDP

* per year (Beijing, etc.)

* per total medals

* per GOLD medal

* per weighted medal (4=gold, 2=silver, 1=bronze)

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nikcub
You should have google'd it, this link has been spreading on Twitter and the
UK websites like mad:

<http://www.medalspercapita.com/>

it has also spread in Australia because, well, check the results and you will
see why.

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marknutter
One thing I never see considered in these types of rankings is the fact that
in America, all the best athletes are tied up playing one of the four
professional sports that make athletes a _lot_ more money than the olympics
ever will. For instance, Robert Griffen III, the new stud QB for the Redskins,
was a world class hurdler in addition to being an all-star football player.
Imagine how dominant the US would be in the Olympics if all its most
athletically gifted professional athletes focused on an olympic event rather
than their respective sports.

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whalerid3r
The Telegraph page that this is pulling data from is itself out of date by a
couple of days. The official website might be a better source:

<http://www.london2012.com/medals/medal-count/>

~~~
pykello
I tried using that page, but they were resisting about automated bots by
giving "Forbidden Request" reponses. I'll try to find a better source though.

~~~
subsystem
Scraping 101: Set you user-agent to mimic a browser, for example: _curl -A
"Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86_64) AppleWebKit/535.1 (KHTML, like Gecko)
Chrome/14.0.835.186 Safari/535.1"<http://www.london2012.com/medals/medal-
count/> _

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drucken
Needs to be at least (reverse) adjusted by number of athletes per country
([http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2012_Summer_Olympics#Sorted_by_...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2012_Summer_Olympics#Sorted_by_number_of_athletes)).

This would reduce anomalies like Great Britain submitting approx. same number
of atheletes as US, yet being less than a 6th in population size.

I doubt there is a way to adjust for submissions per sport and not sure it
would be wise anyway since specialism can be viewed as a fair competitive
advantage even if it suits the industralized or countries with older Olympic
history more.

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mibbitier
anyway you look at it, GB is doing fantastically well :)

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badragon
How about adjusting by the number of Olympians per country?

~~~
eru
There's an upper limit, and the bigger countries send all they can. (Unless
with Olympian you mean something other than number of entrants?)

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ww520
Why not adjusted the ranking by GDP? Sport investment has more to do with
money than population.

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daveungerer
Pretty cool.

One thing is that it's hard to anchor the figures to actual medal counts. I
think normalising the data would be awesome. The normalisation should be such
that sum(actual medals won) = sum(adjusted medals won).

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TimPC
Isn't the general consensus relevant predictor/measure the ability to fund
full-time athletes? A much more interesting (and perhaps fairer) list of
adjusted medal total would adjust for an economic measure (likely GNP or GDP).

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vorg
The present ranking for golds is...

continental Europe 71

native English speakers 66

East Asia 56

Islamic nations 11

central & south America 10

Sub-Sahara 6

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mlader
I'd be interested in seeing a time series representation of this data, similar
to <http://www.gapminder.org>

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zerostar07
I would also like to see the ranking "By national pride sentiments" , as i'm
pretty sure olympics performance is just a meaningless show.

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chj
How about this:

China only sent 621 athletes out of 1.3 billion people, and Brit has 1361 with
a population of merely 62 million.

~~~
bruceboughton
1361? Team GB is about 541 strong.

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Britain_at_the_2012_Summe...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Britain_at_the_2012_Summer_Olympics)

~~~
Someone
I guess the difference is the inclusion of the non-competing members of the
team.
[http://totallympics.com/forum.php?mod=viewthread&tid=231...](http://totallympics.com/forum.php?mod=viewthread&tid=2312)
claims 542 for GB, and 386 for China.

GB has a larger team because it a) made an enormous extra effort and b)
automatically qualifies for every sport it enters. Sports such as waterpolo,
volleyball, football, and hockey typically admit only the world's top 12 or so
of countries. GB probably has an entry in all of them. Being team sports, that
adds up.

The interesting thing to see for GB is how far they will fall back in ten
years time. They were abysmal in 1996 (one gold), but grew since.

~~~
nl
Based on the Australian experience Great Britain will start dropping back in
12 years time (assuming funding for elite sports falls off somewhat like it
has in Australia).

You'll get plenty of silver though...

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loceng
Adjusting by amount of money spent would be neat too.

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__alexs
Needs error bars.

