This is being written during the games, so the table is at a certain point in time; I will update once the Olympics have finished … and make it more complete, but the point stands.
Whilst the Olympics is not really about statistics, those of us with that perversion do tend to want to see the numbers. And every time the Olympics comes around, I get slightly irritated by the medal tables that appear. The headline medal tables simply rank countries in order of the number of medals their athletes have won, which is a spectacularly dumb way of ranking countries – with most other metrics there is the option of looking at deaths per thousand people, etc.
At present the standard medal table is led by China and the US. Both are enormous countries, so of course they get a lot of medals. And indeed the people in the US are probably saying that the US is outperforming China by the simple fact that it has pretty much the same number of medals despite being ¼ of the size! And that is quite right – so why do we not have a table of countries ranked by the population per medal – i.e. if a country has 50 gold medals, and 5,000,000 people then there is one gold medal per 100,000 people. If we do a table for that, we get some very different results :-
| Rank | Country | Gold medals | Population | Population per medal |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Great Britain | 10 | 62m | 6.2m |
| 2 | USA | 21 | 314m | 15m |
| 3 | China | 20 | 1339m | 67m |
These results are very different and there very well may be other surprises if the full medal table is calculated. There are those who might claim this is a simple trick to get the UK on the top of the medal table, but it is not as simple as that … indeed this alternative medal table may well be helpful to larger countries. After all it shows that despite their total medal haul, they are not doing nearly as well as they should do!