Lightning Bolts – but which is the greatest nation at the Olympics when you take into account population size?

Source

Can readers help me develop this further?

IDEA: The ‘Lightening’ has Bolted but can we created another lightening bolt – who by any fair comparison are the true champion nations – those that win medals in proportion to the size of their population.

Consider these categories.

1  Population size to the nearest 50 million – each 50 million = 1 unit i.e rounded up or down to nearest 50 million people.

2 Total number of medals – gold, silver and bronze added together.

3 Total number of medals in relation to nearest 50 million population i.e divided by the number of 50 million ‘units’.

4  Number of medals per 50 million population.

5 Total number of medals in relation to nearest 50 million population – with some + or – for Wealthy/ Middle Wealthy/ Poor.

Some examples based on medal totals on 21st August

Rank Country Gold Silver Bronze TOTAL          TOTAL MEDALS DIVIDED BY NUMBER **                                                                                 of 50 million population ‘units’

1 China 45 15 21 81                                                       3

2 USA 27 29 28 84                                                       14

3 Great Britain 17 11 11 39                                           39

4 Russia 15 15 19 49                                                   16

5 Australia 11 13 13 37                                                37

6 Germany 11 8 10 29                                                 14

7 South Korea 8 10 6 24                                              24

8 Japan 8 6 9 23                                                           8

9 Italy 6 7 8 21                                                            21

10 Ukraine 5 5 9 19                                                     19

The new rank order would be

1st – Great Britain (39)

2nd – Australia (37)

3rd – South Korea (24)

4th – Italy (21)

5th – Ukraine (19)

6th – Russia (16)

7th – Germany (14)*

8th – USA (14)*

9th – Japan

10th – China (3)

* Various criteria can be brought in here.

Of course if you did the comparison with units of 50,000 instead of 50millian the results would look different.

With 50 million units as a Brit it is a matter of some regret that given how much smaller the population of Australia is I might just have to concede that they are the most successful Olympians!

Should be some positive adjustment for countries that manage to get medals in a wide range of different sports?

Should there be some weighting to reflect Wealthy/ Middle Wealthy/ Poor ? Perhaps not because many train in other countries (?)  Clearly against GNP would make a huge difference.

Two useful sites:

http://news.bbc.co.uk/sport1/hi/olympics/medals_table/default.stm

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_population