We got the Bronze for Golds
August 28th, 2004 at 6:20 pm by David FarrarNZ is in third place for the number of gold medals per capita. I’ve just done an Excel on all countries than won more than one gold medal and the ranks are:
1 Norway 0.89 gold medals per million population
2 Australia 0.85
3 New Zealand 0.75
4 Jamacia 0.67
5 Hungary0.60
6 Greece 0.55
Also we have
17 France 0.16
23 Great Britain 0.12
24 USA 0.10
32 China 0.02
So I’m think it is a great result for us to get three golds and two silvers – especially as they were all in real olympic sports, not beach vollyeball or tennis.
No tag for this post.
August 28th, 2004 at 10:11 pm
Do it as a ratio to GDP per capita.
Or even better, if you can find the appropriate denominator, something that measures the country’s overall sadness level and need for unimportant indicators of international importance. A sort of “desperate search for significance” factor…
Vote:August 28th, 2004 at 10:27 pm
Actually a far more interesting ratio would be to have each country’s medals weighted by global viewership or somesuch. Thus, something like a gold in female gymnastics would be weighed very heavily, but a bronze in synconised swimming would be worth about as much as something out of a box of cereal for the country that it went to.
Once the calculations were done then you could identify the most crowd pleasingly ‘successful’ country, and also the country with the most marginal medal winners as far as global interest is concerned.
Sort that out for us thanks David. I’ll check back Sunday for your analysis.
Vote:August 29th, 2004 at 1:52 am
Over at my blog I’m producing rather unscientific research on the number of medals won by attractive young female athletes. It’s certainly fascinating…
Vote:August 29th, 2004 at 11:37 am
Gordon: If one uses the PPP method of measuring GDP, then based on 2002 figures the ranks would be:
1. Jamacia 18.18 golds per $100 billion GDP
2. Georgia 12.5
3. Cuba 9.68
4. Romania 4.73
5. Hungary 4.47
6. Ethiopa 4.17
7. Bulgaria 4.08
8. New Zealand 3.84
9. Ukraine 3.67
10. Austraia 3.24
21. France 0.64
26. Great Britain 0.46
31. USA 0.28
33. Brazil 0.15
PNN – Yes I have been checking daily
Vote:August 29th, 2004 at 9:58 pm
Bronze for Golds
David Farrar has calculated that New Zealand is in third place of the number of Olympic gold medals per capita, exceeded only by Australia and Norway. Well done Norway.
Vote:August 30th, 2004 at 11:25 am
so, going back to the per capita rankings, China would have to win, err, about 1280 gold medals to gain parity with NZ?
Vote:August 30th, 2004 at 11:35 am
Yep – teach them to only offer a lousy toaster in exchange for not having more kids
Vote:August 30th, 2004 at 11:41 am
There is actually another gentleman on the Net who has done the GDP calculations which produce very different results at: http://www.simon.forsyth.net/olympicsGDP.html#TMPM
Total medals per GDP Rank Country Gold Silver Bronze Total Medals
Vote:/GDP
1 ERITREA 0 0 1 1.3624
2 ETHIOPIA 2 3 2 1.0545
3 GEORGIA 2 2 0 1.0160
4 BELARUS 2 6 7 0.8575
5 CUBA 9 7 11 0.8547
6 MONGOLIA 0 0 1 0.8418
7 AZERBAIJAN 1 0 4 0.7019
8 JAMAICA 2 1 2 0.6396
9 BULGARIA 2 1 9 0.6043
10 KENYA 1 4 2 0.5057
11 UZBEKISTAN 2 1 2 0.5026
12 UKRAINE 9 4 10 0.4643
13 LATVIA 0 4 0 0.4136
14 THE BAHAMAS 1 0 1 0.3802
15 ZIMBABWE 1 1 1 0.3613
16 ESTONIA 0 1 2 0.3579
17 ROMANIA 8 5 6 0.3148
18 KAZAKHSTAN 1 4 3 0.2689
19 KOREA, NORTH (DPR OF KOREA) 0 4 1 0.2188
20 HUNGARY 8 7 3 0.2174
21 RUSSIA 27 27 37 0.2099
22 SLOVAKIA 2 2 2 0.1883
23 CROATIA 1 2 2 0.1765
24 PARAGUAY 0 1 0 0.1720
25 LITHUANIA 1 2 0 0.1647
26 SLOVENIA 0 1 3 0.1522
27 SERBIA AND MONTENEGRO (YUGOSLAVIA) 0 2 0 0.1043
28 TRINIDAD AND TOBAGO 0 0 1 0.0980
29 AUSTRALIA 17 16 16 0.0945
30 CZECH REPUBLIC 1 3 4 0.0936
31 GREECE 6 6 4 0.0925
32 CAMEROON 1 0 0 0.0803
33 MOROCCO 2 1 0 0.0674
34 NEW ZEALAND 3 2 0 0.0656
August 30th, 2004 at 3:53 pm
Actually this population thing is bullshit. Team membership limits are as I understand it, not proportional to the country’s population. Thusly the Chinese team for example is not 300 times the size of the NZ team. A weighting would have to be applied to produce valid comparisons as small countries are over represented with athletes at the olympics, and large countries under represented, hence their opportunity set to win medals is disproportionately greater.
Vote:August 30th, 2004 at 9:09 pm
a dear friend of mine who for some strange reason refuses to get a blog (what’s up with that?) had this highly mathematical formula for predicting “our” golds proved correct:
1988 – 3 golds
1992 – 1 gold
1996 – 3 golds
2000 – 1 gold
…
you get the idea.
Vote:August 31st, 2004 at 12:25 pm
How about a ranking of taxpayer spend per medal? We bleat about how much the Aussies spend on their sports but I think they spent considerably less than we did per medal.
But the rankings I’d really like to see are the medal tallies of the “real sports” only. I know it’d be hard to define but a couple simple (though slightly arbitrary in some cases) rules would work:
(1) Cut out all the team sports. Only sports with individual competitors would be left. Perhaps I’d keep beach volleyball to retain audience interest. (We’d lose only one of our medals on this one.)
(2) Cut out any sports incorporating subjective scoring (especially scoring for aesthetics). They’re open to bribery and, let’s face it, most bear no relation to the original olympic sports which were of a martial nature. (Interestingly, we’d keep all our medals under this one.)
Vote:August 31st, 2004 at 1:01 pm
Tomas – agree they should cut out:
a) sports where the olympics is not the pinnacle of achievement (soccer, tennis)
Vote:b) subjective scoring sports
c) most team sports but I think maybe an exception for those which are more group than team – ie rowing 8
d)beach volleyball must stay