Every four years (give or take a pandemic postponement) debate breaks out about the best way to measure who did best at the olympics. I’m going to look at a couple here.

Medals

What’s a better measure of success? Gold medals? Total medals? If we look at medal totals, the top ten looks like this:

Whereas if we focus on gold medals only¹ a very slightly different picture emerges:

Which of these gives the better measure of who did best? Which method you prefer might depend on what country you are from. Perhaps the Japanese are all about gold medals this year, whereas Team GB is on Team Total Medals. We could instead assign scores to different colours of medal and rank countries by score. So let’s say it’s 1 for a bronze, 2 for a silver and 4 for a gold, but this scoring makes absolutely no difference to the top ten. In fact, these are all kind of ways of measuring roughly the same thing because these are all pretty correlated with each other. Today I’m focusing on this year’s games, but I hope to come back to a more long term analysis in a future post.

Population Per Medal

At some point during the last week I got really into following how the Olympic medals per capita table was evolving. Julien Alfred’s gold medal for St Lucia in the Women’s 100m sprint was huge, and then she followed it up with a silver in the 200m. Thea LaFond bringing in the Women’s triple jump gold! Grenada’s two bronze medals (Lindon Victor in Men’s Decathlon and Anderson Peters Men’s Javelin) were also a big deal for the per capita table. Lots of exciting moments for fans of small islands winning medals. At some point the relatively slow update cycle of the Olympic Medals per capita website basically nerd-sniped me into recreating the data myself so that I could get updates when I needed.

I’ll write more about how I did that in a later post – short answer: BeautifulSoup, wikipedia, UN population data and pandas – but for today I thought I’d just lay out the headline figures of poking about in the data.

So, first, the headline table. I’ve followed the above-mentioned website’s lead in reporting the “population per medal” rather than the reciprocal “medals per capita” because I think it’s easier somehow to make comparisons between numbers of people rather than fractions of medals. Below is the people per total medals table top ten (Paris 2024).

Those top three Caribbean island nations putting down an absolutely unassailable lead over the competition. Indeed, Grenada take the top spot in all of the last three olympics.²

One might think, looking at the other nations in these top tens, that the nations regularly doing well in this list are small but rich nations. Remember what we’re doing here: we’re trying to find a way to measure who did the best, which country’s achievement is the most impressive. ³ Is it impressive that, say, New Zealand has both a smallish population and money to spend on frivolous things like olympic athletes?

GDP Per Medal

So this brings us to our next attempt at measuring how well countries did at the olympics. What was unsatisfying about population per medal was that it didn’t take into account that some nations’ olympics training budgets are easily much bigger than others. Perhaps we should instead look at, for example, GDP dollars per medal, instead of people per medal for the Paris games:

The GDP figures – from the World Bank – are 2020 US dollars because that was the year for which most countries had data. Strangely, the World Bank dataset doesn’t have a figure for Taiwan. In any case, I’m pretty sure they wouldn’t be troubling this table if I did include a figure for Taiwan from elsewhere.

Many of the same countries appear here as appeared in our first table. This isn’t surprising, since GDP and population are correlated.⁴ Since GDP and population are correlated, you might think that you’d actually want to do GDP per capita per medal or something like that, but then you’re dividing by population, which gives a huge advantage to more populous countries, which was kind of where we started. In any case, if you do that, you get the table below.

Arguably, what we should do, is calculate GDP per capita per medal. As a very rough approximation here’s what we get:

This is very approximate because we’re dividing 2020 GDP values by 2024 population estimates, so I should really go and find some better GDP per capita estimates if I wanted to take this one further.

Athletes Per Medal

New Zealand do quite well on the Population Per Medal rankings, but they sent 200 athletes to get those 20 medals. Saint Lucia sent 4 athletes and won 2 medals. That is surely a more impressive achievement than the Kiwis! So let’s look at the ratio of athletes sent to medals won.

The really striking thing about this table is that China shows up in tenth. They send a lot of athletes, but their return is pretty good. Contrast this with France’s 600 athletes bringing home 64 medals. I think this table is a little unfair in that team sports need big squads, but I think they only count for one medal in the charts. So countries who had teams in the team sports like Egypt (Football), Argentina (Football), Fiji (Rugby sevens) and Slovenia (Handball, Volleyball) are all at the bottom of this chart. I don’t know if the data set I was working from here included support staff in the list, but the might also cause sports like sailing or cycling to drag down a country’s score here.

Sum Ranks

We’ve got three kind of reasonable ways of measuring how well a country did in the olympics: Population Per Medal, GDP Per Medal and Athletes Per Medal. If we take a country’s rank on each of these measures, and sum those ranks, then we get a kind of aggregate view of who did best at the olympics.

These three measures are kind of related, but I think summing the ranks does a reasonable job of smoothing out some of the sharp edges of each measure. So there we have it. Congratulations to Saint Lucia, officially the most impressive showing at Paris 2024.