I responded to this great Richard Florida post, comparing Olympic medal totals to date against various national statistics, by noting that it didn’t account for the mediating factor of number of Olympians. Then I wondered – which countries are (thus far) racking up medals in or out of proportion to their Olympian count? So here you go:
I’ll provide more analysis when these Games are over, but for now – wow, the Nethelands and Belarus.
On the other end, Estonia, Romania, Spain, Bulgaria, Hungary, New Zealand, Brazil, and Denmark have send double-digit contingents to Sochi and are currently empty-handed.
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02/23/2014 at 14:08
Mobilya ofis buro | Did Russia Really Win the Sochi Medal Count?
[…] blogger Squarely Rooted responded to my original post by proposing an additional and very useful metric to account for the efficiency […]
02/24/2014 at 03:07
ToadEater
I’ve done a similar analysis. It always struck me that weighting results by GDP or population was just a less direct method of weighting by number of Olympians. Looking at the data this year, results correlate a lot better with number of participants per country rather than GDP, population, or GDP per capita, and weighting the results by participants removes most of the effect these other factors have on the results.
However, it’s important to note that there is a flaw in this method that can be easily fixed. Countries that participate in large team events like hockey will be greatly disadvantaged by this weighting, because even if they win the gold, that one medal took 20 or more athletes to get. This can be easily fixed by counting teams as one “athlete” (I call them participants rather than athletes to avoid confusion).
This then brings up the question of whether we should count an athlete competing in multiple events for multiple medals as multiple participants. However, it’s more impressive and takes more skill for an athlete to win two events than for two athletes win those two events, so it seems to me that athletes who compete in at least one individual event should count as one and only one participant, while those who compete in team events and no individual events should not count, except as a part of the team participant.
This analysis leads to some interesting observations. For example, even though the United States has more athletes in these games than any other country (230), they actually have less participants (165) than Russia (173) and Canada (170).
02/24/2014 at 07:21
squarelyrooted
If you take a look at my latest post, I did something similar. Rather than deflate a country’s athlete count, though, I instead inflated their medal count based on the number of participants in the event. Without looking at the data, though, I’m not sure if this would produce analogous results..
02/25/2014 at 11:54
ToadEater
That would greatly skew the results, because now whoever wins hockey will have a large portion of their team as gold medal winners. There’s a reason the IOC gives physical medals to each team member but only counts the win as a single medal for the country.
02/25/2014 at 12:57
squarelyrooted
Take a look at my big wrap-up:
https://squarelyrooted.com/2014/02/24/winter-olympics-wrap-up/
It shows lots of different measurements, including those weighted by team size. I also discuss the positives and negatives of doing so – it depends on what you’re trying to calculate or judge. Note that even when you weight the events by team size, the Dutch still win by every efficiency measure! The Canadians do come out ahead on the various absolute total measures, though, for the very reason you give – hockey.
02/24/2014 at 03:32
Did Russia Really Win the Sochi Medal Count? | Radio Free
[…] blogger Squarely Rooted responded to my original post by proposing an additional and very useful metric to account for the efficiency […]
02/24/2014 at 06:02
Winter Olympics Wrap-Up | squarely rooted
[…] should take a look at my last three posts on this topic […]
02/25/2014 at 05:18
Koen Janssen
A fairly important influence, not mentioned yet, is the olympic qualification bar. For instance the Dutch won’t let an athlete represent them if he or she hasn’t been able to finish among the top 8 at international matches or rankings. This is a far more strict bar compared to the IOC qualification.
The Dutch athletes/medals efficiency can be explained by this policy however it reduces the analysis to a policy efficiency comparison.
A more accurate national efficiency rankings could be medals/inhabitants (age between 18 and 35 years);
02/25/2014 at 06:14
squarelyrooted
I definitely think international matters of national policy can in part explain performance at the Olympics, though I think that’s also endogenous to some extent with other factors. Nevertheless, this doesn’t necessarily explain why the Dutch do so well; it only takes one or two excellent skaters from the entire rest of the world to win all those gold and silver medals that the Dutch won…
I also think honing in on the youth population would be useful, but that data would have been harder to come by (though certainly not impossible).