Per capita Olympic medals?

To many folks, the upshot of the Olympics is the number of medal their own country was able to garner and hoard during the two-week festivities. 

Usually, larger and well-to-do countries like the United States get the larger number of medals, but often, much smaller countries like Jamaica or New Zealand get many more medals based on their population than the US does. 

So, I’ve always wondered which countries would lead a medal count contest based on their population? I wanted to do the math myself, but found a website from Craig Nevill-Manning, a Kiwi, who had the same idea but executed it, and not only did the count based on population, but also, on GDP 

1. Based on Population 

What this means is that some countries are more “productive” in terms of finding top athletes in their population, for instance, tiny New Zealand with less than 5 million people got 20 medals, white the much larger United States with more than 330 million “only” obtained 113 of them, which makes the Kiwi 69 times more productive than the overall medal winner! 

While San Marino doesn’t count as the tiny principality is actually part of Italy, New Zealand and Jamaica’s performance is quite impressive at around 250-330,0000 people per medals. Canada, France, Russia or Germany are in a much higher population per medal bracket, comprised between 1.5 to 2.3 million. 

The US is a notably above that threshold at close to 3 million, China at 16 million, while India at close to 200 million has some serious work to do. 

2. Based on GDP 

This indicates that poor countries, with small GDP, like Jamaica’s $14 billion, got 9 medals, which comes to $670 million per medal, against very rich ones, like the US’s $20,000 billion, only received 113, bringing up the share of revenue per medal to a staggering $71.9 billion, which shows a distressing lack of efficiency on the part of wealthy countries. 

Kudos for the top 20 that showed that a small GDP doesn’t precludes stellar performance. That also applies to New Zealand that does great too at 4.34 compared to the other wealthy nations that follows at between 6 and 10 times GDP per medal. 

Of course, it gets much worse with the USA, but not much better for India that is saved by a dead last Saudi Arabia. https://www.medalspercapita.com/