Resident Americans: A Question

[-Jrabbit]

Medals per capita or medals per athlete.

Jamaica FTW!

[*End Is Forever*]

Every medal table I've ever seen before that NBC one has sorted by number of gold medals... and damn that hurt in 1996...

[Winston]

Originally posted by -Jrabbit
Medals per capita or medals per athlete.

Jamaica FTW!

For Athens 2004, I did a comparison of all the medal winning countries, ranked by medals won per capita, and posted it here. I awarded 3 points for Gold, 2 for Silver and 1 for Bronze. I used the latest CIA Factbook figures for population.

I checked the archives but the thread is not there.

I'd be willing to do a similar comparison for these games, once they're over.

It's quite interesting. I recall New Zealand, Australia, Norway and Jamaica being at or near the top of the 2004 table. India was dead last.

[RGBVideo]

For me, 16 years of interest in the Olympics

Originally posted by Krill


Yup, care to come up with a few fair values? 3/2/1? 4/2/1? π/e/i?

Medal rankings have been based on the amount of gold medals and deciding tie-breakers by silver medals as long as I have lived

[snoopy369]

Strictly speaking, medals per athlete is a poor metric, as it penalizes countries for having athletes that meet the minimum criteria. As many sports have minimum criteria (ie, track/field, and I believe swimming) to go to the olympics (even if you're the #1 female runner in the Vatican, you still have to do 10k in less than 31 minutes (or whatever) to go to the olympics); and other sports have qualifying matches pre-olympics to get in (football does, I believe?).

Medals per capita could be interesting, but I think at the end of the day, medal totals - however calculated - are more reasonable. I definitely think silver/bronze should count for something, but I'm not sure what.

[Japher]

MGDP= Medal count per GDP

seeing as some of these sports require ample capital contributions in order to become competitive

or

Au%GDP Gold Medal Count per % of total Medal Count won by the country per GDP

sort of normalizing towards how successful you are at converting your investment into successful medals; efficiency

or, even better,

Au%PERCAPGDP = Au%GDP/population

This way you can gauge the potential talent pool of the country in relationship to it's ability to field gold medalist.

I find it interesting that Jamaica is not really a contender in rowing or swimming, but is great at running. While Serbia and other countries not noted for great beaches or water do well in these events.

[DanS]

Originally posted by Asher
2004: http://web.archive.org/web/200408300...om/id/3032113/

Oh how the Russians have fallen.

[Monk]

Counting in Winter Olympics medals, Liechtenstein is surely the winner. A country of thirty-something thousand people has so far secured nine Olympic medals.

[Spaced Cowboy]

NBC's coverage of the Olympics is hugely US biased. It is to the point where it actually bothers me, but I will give them this, their overall coverage seems a lot better this year than 4 ago.

China is owning these games, the US is still clinging to the fact that it is #1.

[DanS]

As alluded to above, the US is doing about the same as 4 years ago. China's taking the medals from the likes of Russia.

[Zkribbler]

Originally posted by DanS
As alluded to above, the US is doing about the same as 4 years ago. China's taking the medals from the likes of Russia.

Uh oh. Russia doesn't like it when another country has something that Russia believes belongs to her.

[Naked Gents Rut]

Here's a couple interesting pieces on the issue.

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB121856271893833843.html

http://blogs.wsj.com/chinajournal/2008/08/14/counting-precious-medals

It seems China is winning big according to the internationally-accepted way of counting medals.

[Combat Ingrid]

Originally posted by Japher
MGDP= Medal count per GDP

seeing as some of these sports require ample capital contributions in order to become competitive

or

Au%GDP Gold Medal Count per % of total Medal Count won by the country per GDP

sort of normalizing towards how successful you are at converting your investment into successful medals; efficiency

or, even better,

Au%PERCAPGDP = Au%GDP/population

This way you can gauge the potential talent pool of the country in relationship to it's ability to field gold medalist.

Some guy adjusted the medals in Athens 2004 for both population and GDP: http://tianmi.info/blogge/posts/08/0...medaljrakning/

It's in Swedish, but the rankings should be obvious. Most importantly, by this way Georgia is ranked 3rd and Russia is ranked 23rd

[Aeson]

I enjoy watching the Olympics (that being the actual events). The medal count stuff is just a waste of time, and it's rather sad that people care about it at all.

[snoopy369]

Originally posted by Aeson
I enjoy watching the Olympics (that being the actual events). The medal count stuff is just a waste of time, and it's rather sad that people care about it at all.

QFT ... (though my event-watching enjoyment varies by my boredom level)