
Olympic medals per capita - slewis
http://www.medalspercapita.com/
======
hughes
Smaller countries can also get disproportionate representation in the
olympics. When there's one team or competitor per country, the smallest
country has the highest per-capita representation. While they have a smaller
pool of athletes to draw from, I'd bet it changes the potential outcome where
a straight up per-capita medal count is also somewhat misleading.

I wonder what medals per competitor per capita would look like?

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sevenless
They also have more variability. A tiny nation that gets one medal gets a huge
per-capita frequency. You'd want to regularize it a bit.

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greenshackle
Definitely. A similar example: at one point studies started coming out that
showed the best performing schools were small. Cue a lot of noise on how small
schools are better, if you want your kids to be successful, send them to a
small school, etc. I think these findings even showed up in government
reports/recommendations.

Problem is, the worst performing schools were _also_ small. Almost all of the
effect could be explained by higher variance.

Unfortunately I don't remember where where I read about this, wish I could
provide sources.

EDIT: found it. It wasnt government, it was the Gates foundation, who spent
billions into supporting smaller schools.

[http://press.princeton.edu/chapters/s8863.pdf](http://press.princeton.edu/chapters/s8863.pdf)

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sevenless
Oh my God. They wasted a billion dollars and made education _worse_ because
they didn't understand variance.

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jedberg
What I'm looking for is a chart of total medals vs. possible medals.

For example, for a country that only has one athlete in one sport, their total
possible medals is 1. So if they get 1 medal, they have a 100% success rate,
which is pretty good.

I've seen charts of total medals vs # of athletes participating, but that's
not quite right, because it doesn't account for team sports. One country might
have 4 people on the swim relay team, but that's still only one possible medal
(and if they win it should only count as one).

I suspect someone will link me directly to what I'm looking for soon, but I've
yet to find it on my own.

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unethical_ban
The breakdown by team vs. individual, and then unique individual athletes with
medals would be interesting.

Weight Phelps and a bronze Judo winner equally, in order to better capture the
individual talent and reduce "talent stacking" of having a single athlete
winning 10 variations on swimming.

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jessaustin
Yeah swimming is sort of combinatorially ridiculous. They really ought to be
able to get by with two strokes rather than four. Backstroke and freestyle
would make the most aesthetic sense to me, because I don't really see the
point in a race using an inherently slower technique but I can see the point
of going backwards. However, don't add a bunch of sidestroke races!

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sevenless
Freestyle isn't a stroke, technically. You can swim any stroke that you
like[0], and swimmers usually choose the front crawl.

[0] provided that you don't swim the whole thing underwater

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jessaustin
Yeah that's the point. They can get rid of the races in which the "proper"
stroke is specified in complicated fashion.

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toomanybeersies
I've always thought butterfly was a bizarre event. It's one of the most
complicated strokes, and it's slower and more tiring than the front crawl. As
far as I'm concerned, it's an arbitrary stroke.

I guess a lot of Olympic sports are arbitrarily limited though, walking and
triple jump come to mind.

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caf
Butterfly is actually the second-fastest stroke, at least over the shorter
distances. There have been swimmers in the past that have used the butterfly
stroke in freestyle races at high level events.

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toomanybeersies
But that's the issue. It's not an optimal stroke for anything. It's not the
fastest, it's tiring, and it's difficult to do.

It's like making a running race where you have to do a small jump every step.

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rezashirazian
I just noticed India has no medals. Can someone with more knowledge on this
perhaps shed some light? Of the remaining sports are there any that India is a
medal contender? I find it odd that a country with more than 1.2 billion would
go through the olympics empty handed.

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Chronic9q
The Indian culture does not value athletics or physical fitness activities (or
medical health, for that matter) as much as other countries. And it is
showing.

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overcast
After spending a month there in March, I agree totally. EVERY adult male has a
giant gut, and beyond their early 20's the women are all over weight as well.
I was not really expecting that.

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throwthisawayt
Obesity is not the issue causing this. India has an almost billion person
population with a 15% obesity rate with 0 medals while the US has a 33%
obesity rate with 80 medals and a third of the population.

Funding and culture are the biggest issues. The only sport Indians care about
and that you can financially support yourself professionally is in cricket.
Unsurprisingly India is quite good at cricket and would def. have some medals
if it was an Olympic sport.

The truth is that indian has millions of potential athletes who never pursue
their passion because they are pressured by parents to focus on academics and
other areas. There is no culture glorifying athletes. The few who do end up
being athletes play cricket.

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overcast
I never said anything about obesity causing the issue with athletics. I was
agreeing that the general Indian population doesn't seem to value fitness or
health. Which from my limited experience, is absolutely true.

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toomanybeersies
But the same can be said for the UK or the USA, and they both have very good
Olympic records.

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overcast
Which just reinforces the original statement, that India doesn't give a shit
about fitness/athleticism. We value sports highly in the states, thus we have
a large talent pool.

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Someone
It wouldn't be suitable for the general public, but here's how I would do the
comparison for potential:

\- assume a normal distribution of innate ability.

\- assume a different normal distribution of each individual's variation in
scoring (all with an expected value of zero and identical variance, smaller
than that of innate ability)

\- assume each nation picks its best athletes in trials (doesn't really
happen; for example, Bolt wouldn't have qualified for Rio if Jamaica did that)

What you will get is that China and India should each have about 15% of the
best performers. However, top performers of other large countries will not be
far behind them in innate ability, so that there is a decent chance that their
form of the day will make them beat better players. Also, most of the best
athletes will live in countries with large populations, and most of those will
not make it to the Olympics because they get beaten by their compatriots in
qualification, either because of lack of innate ability or due to 'luck'.

End result I guess will be that each country that is large enough (pure guess:
50 million+, say Argentina, Britain, Colombia, France, Germany, Kenya, South
Korea or anything larger) should, aan else being equal, get about the same
number of medals.

Of course, not all else is equal. Any difference will be due to other factors:

\- sport-mindedness (example: New Zealand)

\- money invested (example: Great Britain, Qatar (a country that _buys_
Olympic champions)

\- genetic make-up (example: Fiji in rugby)

\- culture (example: table tennis and China, or India as a negative example
for almost any sport that isn't cricket or field hockey)

\- religion (many countries send a token female athlete because they have to,
thus giving up about 50% of their potential number of medals)

Those are hard to quantify, and can change significantly over time. Britain is
an extreme example, with 1 (one!) gold medal at the 1996 Olympics. Lottery
money has changed that tremendously, not only for the home Olympics in London.

A final factor is that countries that are willing to spend money will
influence what sports become Olympic sports. I don't think it is accidental
that there are so many events in athletics and swimming, two sports that the
US excels at. Advertising money buys events.

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jdminhbg
> A final factor is that countries that are willing to spend money will
> influence what sports become Olympic sports. I don't think it is accidental
> that there are so many events in athletics and swimming, two sports that the
> US excels at. Advertising money buys events.

I don't doubt that advertising plays a role in which events exist, but
athletics and swimming have had lots of events since the dawn of the Olympics,
probably because they're easy to set up and they don't take a long time to
run. If you were trying to get the US more medals, you might have 3-on-3
basketball, 1-on-1 basketball, 12 minute basketball, H.O.R.S.E., a dunk
contest, etc.

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jpatokal
The "all time" view is also interesting, although it's pretty heavily skewed
towards northern Europe thanks to the origins of the competition:

[http://www.medalspercapita.com/#medals-per-capita:all-
time](http://www.medalspercapita.com/#medals-per-capita:all-time)

 _Sic transit gloria mundi_ : Finland's at the top of the all-time rankings,
but doesn't have a single medal so far in 2016 (although there's an unexpected
one coming up in female boxing, as an essentially unknown boxer just beat the
world champion and semifinalists are guaranteed at least a bronze).

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tomjakubowski
> semifinalists are guaranteed at least a bronze

Huh. How does that work? Are the semi-finals a three person round robin,
rather than a four-person bracket? Do they give out two bronze medals?

edit: yes, two bronzes in fighting sports, because the minimum rest period
between matches makes a "bronze medal match" difficult to schedule. source:
[https://www.quora.com/Why-are-there-2-bronze-medals-
awarded-...](https://www.quora.com/Why-are-there-2-bronze-medals-awarded-in-
combat-sports)

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pingec
Slovenia should be updated, we got 4 medals so far, not 3.

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drpgq
Amount of GDP versus medals would be interesting as well.

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sevenless
Was thinking Olympic medals per local dollar-equivalent spent on training.
Who's got the most cost-effective sports programs?

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dogma1138
It's a bit harder to estimate, it's like evaluating NASA and ROSCOSMOS, NASA's
budget is considerably larger but it's not necessarily "less efficient" just
because each mission costs more.

Olympic medals per portion of GDP spent on sports education and the olympic
team in each country might be a better method.

Also a good metric is how much effort/cost does it take to get into the
olympic team of each country, the US is somewhat special in this case since in
some cases one needs to break a world record just to get pass the team's
trials since they have a huge pool of athletes competing for spots.

But the US is an outlier in general, it's pretty much the only country where
you can live as a semi-pro athlete and actually make money, college sports are
better funded than most professional sports leagues in other countries (NCAA
has a 700M club pool, UEFA champions league has a club pool of about 700M
EURO's), and college athletic scholarships exist for virtually every sport.

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loader
Why the lack of Winter Olympics data except for Sochi?

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fastball
Unfortunately, there is no easily accessible API to get Olympic medal data, so
the creator of this website undoubtedly has to do some semi-manual data input.

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willyt
( population * gdp ) / number of medals

Would be more interesting. Medals cost money. The UK has invested something
like £5m per medal won.

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ben_jones
FWIW this SPA was written with plain javascript + jQuery and one of Google's
visualization APIs. Pretty cool imo.

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SubiculumCode
I bet the smaller countries tend to have lower test-retest intra-class
correlations, olympics to olympics.

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EnFinlay
Man, I was excited to see Vancouver 2010 numbers.

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tener
Grenada rocks.

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jessaustin
Well, Kirani James does, anyway.

