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Thursday, August 2, 2012

Alternative Olympic Games Medal Tally - 2012


Bill Mitchell's alternative medal tally
 
- Last updated August 2, 2012 - 05:02 EAST
(Professor Bill Mitchell is the Professor of Economics, Director, Centre of Full Employment and Equity, University of Newcastle, Callaghan NSW 2308, Australia)


Olympic medal tallies are a contestable measure. What would happen if we added a few popular indices to a review of medal tallies by countries competing at the games?

Bill Mitchell presents an analysis is derived from the Olympic Games Medal Tally and aimed to present a different view of the Games. 

The absolute (official) medal count allows large nations to hear their national anthem a lot but hides facts like how large their economy is (the largest having more resources to devote to sport and nutrition etc), how large their population is (more people to win medals), and how much income per person the nation has (arguably the best measure of the capacity of the nation to mount a sport's campaign in pursuit of medals).

Alternative medal counts modify the official tally to take into account size of economy, size of population and the income per head that each medal-winning nation enjoys.

The comparisons cannot be used to extrapolate anything. There are clearly not enough medals available at the Olympic Games for a largely populated country like China or the US or India, to name a few of several to win their "fair share". But then we also would expect the large countries to exhibit scale economies that smaller countries cannot.

Whatever, the tables are not statistical or probabilistic in nature and carry no predictive value. They are just for some fun and should not be taken seriously.


The following table is presented by The Guardian.co.uk - sport - datablog - 2012 - alternative medal table

Alternative medal rankings


Country
Official ranking
GDP
Population
Team size
Australia1514425
Azerbaijan39333640
Belarus39293749
Belgium39484048
Brazil17454534
Canada26422835
China125392
Colombia23123221
Cuba2331122
Czech Republic29152138
Denmark29181236
Egypt29164637
France428139
Georgia19257
Germany6201511
Great Britain11322032
Greece39474146
Hungary126313
India39494943
Indonesia2738483
Italy7221712
Japan9402610
Kazakhstan81178
Lithuania198216
Mexico25364326
Moldova3952729
Mongolia3972333
Netherlands17301428
New Zealand37371845
North Korea51101
Norway2727623
Poland29313842
Qatar39431614
Romania16485
Russia10172924
Serbia39233547
Singapore39463030
Slovakia37262130
Slovenia199118
South Africa14213017
South Korea31396
Spain29444244
Sweden29331939
Taiwan29393419
Thailand29194415
USA241244
Ukraine13102527
Uzbekistan39244741
Venezuela19353320


1 comment:

AstridsSoapbox said...

I like it! I'm getting very tired of always saying something like 'Australia is doing very well compared to (say) USA considering how small Australia's population is...