There are obviously a lot of ways to measure how well a country did at the Olympics. This post takes a view that we should look at how many people the country had to draw on in order to send the athletes to China to compete. There are a lot of problems with this including: ex-pats competing for their home country, vast disparity in wealth between countries and the relative interest in the Olympic games of the cultures. One of the things that jumps out immediately is that island nations that draw on a larger related population do very well in the games. They likely have inherited not only the interest in the competition but are also wealthy enough to train and compete in the games.
One of the things that was interesting in putting this together was that I eventually settled on PowerSet as the easiest way to lookup the population of a country. Both Yahoo and Google will give shortcuts to many of them, they don’t do it for all of them. Though PowerSet gets this population data through Freebase, Freebase itself doesn’t have a great search interface.
If I was going to declare an overall country winner for the games I would likely choose Australia. I’ve highlighted the top-10 total medal winners in the table in blue and they are far ahead of anyone else in the top-10 on a people / medal basis.
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Why? Why would anyone do this?
) You need to have one full america in India to win a medal. You should consider other parameters as well. Nagesh’ suggestion of using quality of life (per capita income?) would be interesting to see.
As I mention in the blog, I agree that this is biased against countries that are either uninterested or unable to compete. Here is the original spreadsheet if you want to mess around with it:
http://sheet.zoho.com/public/spullara/olympic-medals-with-population
Ah, should have done a quick search before bothering. Fun exercise anyway:
http://www.stubbornmule.net/2008/08/olympics-by-gdp/
Looking at China's totals really makes you think for a sec about how many of the kids taken from their families as toddlers to enter those athletic academies DON'T make it.
@sam: The more the merrier, I say! But, I’m glad you found my piece as well! In a follow-up post I actually decided to award the adjusted Olympic games to Jamaica. This is because they came second in the medals per capita and third by GDP. In fact, if you look at score (Gold = 3 points, Silver = 2 points, Bronze = 1 point), Jamaica actually came first per capita!
Note also that the Netherland Antilles place in the ranking was short-lived as their runner was disqualified and lost their medal!
I’ve popped all the data (including GDP results) over on Swivel and you can find everything here: http://www.swivel.com/users/show/1009803
@Gaurav Why? Because it’s fun!
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Interesting post, loved reading it!
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Just tried Powerset it's truly better than Google or yahoo in terms of providing the proper information! Now I got the idea how you managed to made this post look so simple and awesome! thanks for the heads up about Powerset, I never knew of it's existence.
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Next time, just ask someone in the sports team — we had to go collect that data as well to produce pages like http://sports.yahoo.com/olympics/beijing/aus.
I can't find my country:-/ I'll try powerset.
I can't find my country:-/ I'll try powerset.