Olympic medals per capita
medalspercapita.com
medalspercapita.com
I wonder what medals per competitor per capita would look like?
Problem is, the worst performing schools were also small. Almost all of the effect could be explained by higher variance.
Unfortunately I don't remember where where I read about this, wish I could provide sources.
EDIT: found it. It wasnt government, it was the Gates foundation, who spent billions into supporting smaller schools.
Genuine question as I'm admittedly not very familiar with the mathematical/statistical aspects of this. I am however mildly satisfied with my home country's per-capita performance in this and prior summer olympics, and curious to learn if/why I maybe shouldn't be :)
Count data is nice to model with a Poisson distribution, and a conjugate Gamma prior distribution. We'll assume a lot of things about the distribution of medal rates and medals which probably aren't true in reality.
For the global prior, eyeballing the medals-per-capita list for all countries, it has mean value around 3E-7 and standard deviation about 5E-7. That corresponds very roughly to the distribution Gamma(0.25, 1E6) for the prior. A Gamma with parameters (a, b) has mean value a/b and standard deviation sqrt(a)/b, so I just matched the numbers.
For a country with N medals and P population, we want to update our posterior distribution of their medal-per-capita rate based on a Gamma(0.25, 1E6) prior and a Poisson distribution. The updated posterior distribution is conveniently, Gamma(0.25+N, 1E6+P). (That's the conjugacy property).
So Grenada's medal rate, with N=1, P=100,000, has posterior distribution Gamma(1.25, 1.1E6). This has mean value 1.25/1.1E6 = 1.1E-6. Compare that mean value to the raw medal-per-capita rate of 1E-5 - in other words, if this model is to be believed, we should heavily discount Grenada's great performance. On the other hand Australia's medal rate barely changes from 9.2E-7 to 9.7E-7 by using the prior, close to Grenada's Bayesian rate. So it takes a larger population into account quite naturally.
This is a fun website, but the Olympics would need a lot more events for it to mean something. If each athlete were only allowed to compete in a single event, then it might be insightful for countries at least as successful at capturing medals as, say, Great Britain.
I'll be Phelps' hometown has a crazy medal count per capita.
so, New Zealand on top! sounds good :)
Bending the rules until we win since before bowling under arm was officially banned.
The other thing is that in most sports each country is limited to the same number of participants. In swimming for example if the US had the 4 of the best 10 swimmers in an event only two get to compete at the Olympics which leaves them at a slight disadvantage.
For example, for a country that only has one athlete in one sport, their total possible medals is 1. So if they get 1 medal, they have a 100% success rate, which is pretty good.
I've seen charts of total medals vs # of athletes participating, but that's not quite right, because it doesn't account for team sports. One country might have 4 people on the swim relay team, but that's still only one possible medal (and if they win it should only count as one).
I suspect someone will link me directly to what I'm looking for soon, but I've yet to find it on my own.
Weight Phelps and a bronze Judo winner equally, in order to better capture the individual talent and reduce "talent stacking" of having a single athlete winning 10 variations on swimming.
[0] provided that you don't swim the whole thing underwater
I guess a lot of Olympic sports are arbitrarily limited though, walking and triple jump come to mind.
Perhaps swimming should take weightlifting as an example. This discipline requires lifters to perform two lifting techniques, the "snatch" and the "clean and jerk", and combines those to get the final result. This is similar to "medley" swim races, which may be a reasonable compromise between the current four-stroke insanity and eliminating stroke requirements altogether.
Walking is at least a natural gait. Triple jump is a single event, so it doesn't have the multiplicative effects that swimming strokes have.
It's like making a running race where you have to do a small jump every step.
edit: if downvoting me to hell is going to give a bronze medal to India, then please down-vote me to oblivion.
If you're claiming Indian athletes are incompetent - WHY? Lack of training, the good talent decides on other career paths, etc.
#2. The article is not deep, it rings like shallow talking point of India not getting medal apologists.
#3. Incompetence from head to toe. There are multiple factors, but to simplify and make it sound like a single problem issue, the biggest impediment to Indian sports are Indian Olympic Committee and Ministry of Sports, are primarily plump political posts.
#4. No number of explanations can convince me there is a method behind the madness of 1.2 billion people that too a majority under the age of 30, cannot win one bronze medal.
To win one bronze medal, you really do not need Nike or University of Oregon track and field program. Smaller nations that are far more corrupt than India were pulling medals and India did not. This is not a one off, India has remained at the bottom of medal tally for long time, Bejing and London gave some hope because of multiple medals, and now reverting to big ZERO is disheartening and maddening at the same time.
For example, the article mentions caste, buts fails to notice that most of the athletes are not affluent people from upper castes. The kids going into cricket are from relatively well off families who are able to afford kits. However, The archery team's top people are mostly from tribal backgrounds. Also most of the people in the wrestling and boxing teams are from lower-middle/working class OBC backgrounds. I'm assuming the same can be said for a lot of sports like track and field, weightlifting etc. (the exceptions being sports like tennis, badminton etc.)
Sport does present a good opportunity for many people from poorer backgrounds, who are able get jobs in public sector companies, for their sporting achievements. So these athletes have plenty of motivation to do well, and follow their prescribed training in a disciplined manner.
What needs to be examined is how effective the sports administration is in various levels in identifying and supporting the athletes. Going by the results, they are not effective at all. So logically they have to take most of the blame.
Edit: Also the article mentions good things about India's achievements in cricket. There again we have a very mediocre team which has a very difficult time playing in unfamiliar conditions outside India. However, I have heard good things of late, so that may be changing. So there may be some truth to the statement that our country produces some very mediocre-middling sportsmen irrespective of the facilities given to them.
Prior to 2016, their latest gold medal was earned in 2008 and that year they earned 3 medals total, and prior to that in 1980, in which year they earned 1 medal total.
[1] http://www.olympic.org/olympic-results [2] https://www.olympic.org/india [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/India_at_the_Olympics [4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/All-time_Olympic_Games_medal_t...
* which of course this might not be
This is of course false. The sample size has to be calculated based on the size of the population.
Funding and culture are the biggest issues. The only sport Indians care about and that you can financially support yourself professionally is in cricket. Unsurprisingly India is quite good at cricket and would def. have some medals if it was an Olympic sport.
The truth is that indian has millions of potential athletes who never pursue their passion because they are pressured by parents to focus on academics and other areas. There is no culture glorifying athletes. The few who do end up being athletes play cricket.
Give it time. Internet literacy is still weak in the general public.
Once they make a Bollywood film incorporating the wisdom of /r/fitness and /r/steroids , india will come with a vengeance. Atleast I hope...
But seriously -- do you think they'd play 20-20 matches to make it fit? That's still almost twice as long as a soccer^H^H^H^H^H^Hfootball match.
Yes many nations with marginal cricket teams (perhaps including India?) would complain that they were left out, but similar unfairness happens in every Olympic discipline, e.g. when the top five in the world are from one nation that can only send one competitor.
- assume a normal distribution of innate ability.
- assume a different normal distribution of each individual's variation in scoring (all with an expected value of zero and identical variance, smaller than that of innate ability)
- assume each nation picks its best athletes in trials (doesn't really happen; for example, Bolt wouldn't have qualified for Rio if Jamaica did that)
What you will get is that China and India should each have about 15% of the best performers. However, top performers of other large countries will not be far behind them in innate ability, so that there is a decent chance that their form of the day will make them beat better players. Also, most of the best athletes will live in countries with large populations, and most of those will not make it to the Olympics because they get beaten by their compatriots in qualification, either because of lack of innate ability or due to 'luck'.
End result I guess will be that each country that is large enough (pure guess: 50 million+, say Argentina, Britain, Colombia, France, Germany, Kenya, South Korea or anything larger) should, aan else being equal, get about the same number of medals.
Of course, not all else is equal. Any difference will be due to other factors:
- sport-mindedness (example: New Zealand)
- money invested (example: Great Britain, Qatar (a country that _buys_ Olympic champions)
- genetic make-up (example: Fiji in rugby)
- culture (example: table tennis and China, or India as a negative example for almost any sport that isn't cricket or field hockey)
- religion (many countries send a token female athlete because they have to, thus giving up about 50% of their potential number of medals)
Those are hard to quantify, and can change significantly over time. Britain is an extreme example, with 1 (one!) gold medal at the 1996 Olympics. Lottery money has changed that tremendously, not only for the home Olympics in London.
A final factor is that countries that are willing to spend money will influence what sports become Olympic sports. I don't think it is accidental that there are so many events in athletics and swimming, two sports that the US excels at. Advertising money buys events.
I don't doubt that advertising plays a role in which events exist, but athletics and swimming have had lots of events since the dawn of the Olympics, probably because they're easy to set up and they don't take a long time to run. If you were trying to get the US more medals, you might have 3-on-3 basketball, 1-on-1 basketball, 12 minute basketball, H.O.R.S.E., a dunk contest, etc.
http://www.medalspercapita.com/#medals-per-capita:all-time
Sic transit gloria mundi: Finland's at the top of the all-time rankings, but doesn't have a single medal so far in 2016 (although there's an unexpected one coming up in female boxing, as an essentially unknown boxer just beat the world champion and semifinalists are guaranteed at least a bronze).
Huh. How does that work? Are the semi-finals a three person round robin, rather than a four-person bracket? Do they give out two bronze medals?
edit: yes, two bronzes in fighting sports, because the minimum rest period between matches makes a "bronze medal match" difficult to schedule. source: https://www.quora.com/Why-are-there-2-bronze-medals-awarded-...
Olympic medals per portion of GDP spent on sports education and the olympic team in each country might be a better method.
Also a good metric is how much effort/cost does it take to get into the olympic team of each country, the US is somewhat special in this case since in some cases one needs to break a world record just to get pass the team's trials since they have a huge pool of athletes competing for spots.
But the US is an outlier in general, it's pretty much the only country where you can live as a semi-pro athlete and actually make money, college sports are better funded than most professional sports leagues in other countries (NCAA has a 700M club pool, UEFA champions league has a club pool of about 700M EURO's), and college athletic scholarships exist for virtually every sport.
Would be more interesting. Medals cost money. The UK has invested something like £5m per medal won.