Per Capita Medal Count
The US achieved its stated goal of 100 medals in the games of the XXVIIIth Olympiad with 103, which should be enough padding to account for any appeals. This is more than any other nation, but does that make the US the best sporting nation? I decided to look at the medal count per capita.
The Bahamas easily led the way, setting the bar at over 6.7 medals per million people (mpmp). They only had two medals, both from women's track and field. Tanique Williams Darling won gold in the 400m, while Debbie Ferguson took bronze in the 200m. However, when you don't even have 300,000 citizens, I think that's a job well down.
The Aussies did nothing to shake their sport crazy stereotype, coming in second, with 2.5 mpmp. This includes more that one swimming or diving medal per million people.
The Cubans are the team that you don't want to meet in a dark alley. They won 2.4 mpmp with 18 of their 27 medals coming in boxing, judo, taekwondo, and wrestling. Plus, I'm sure the gold medal winning baseball team could help out with their bats.
Zimbabwe took 2.2 mpmp, but they were all won by backstroker Kirsty Coventry (gold in the 200m backstroke, silver in the 100m backstroke, bronze in the 200m Individual Medley).
Fourteen other countries did better than 1 mpmp: Estonia, Slovenia, Jamaica, Hungary, Latvia, Bulgaria, Greece, Denmark, Belarus, the Netherlands, Norway, New Zealand, Croatia, and Slovakia.
The US ended up 41st out of the 75 medal-winning countries, with only a measley 0.37 mpmp, just behind Canada and Mongolia, and just ahead of Israel and Portugal. Here are the complete standings
India brought up the rear with just one silver medal (Rajyavardhan S. Rathore in the men's double trap) to show for its one-sixth of the world's population, although it can draw some solace from the fact that the two largest countries that did not win a single medal are its neighbors Pakistan and Bangladesh. Vaccinations for Olympic fever are apparently not required to visit the subcontinent, or at least while cricket is not an Olympic sport.
Kudos must also go to the Hungarian team, who led the way with 3 of the 7 medals stripped due to failure of drug tests. If you're gonna try to cheat, at least do it well enough to make a difference. They were men's hammer throw gold medalist Adrian Annus, men's discus gold medalist Robert Fazekas, and weightlifting silver medalist Ferenc Gyurkovics.
The Bahamas easily led the way, setting the bar at over 6.7 medals per million people (mpmp). They only had two medals, both from women's track and field. Tanique Williams Darling won gold in the 400m, while Debbie Ferguson took bronze in the 200m. However, when you don't even have 300,000 citizens, I think that's a job well down.
The Aussies did nothing to shake their sport crazy stereotype, coming in second, with 2.5 mpmp. This includes more that one swimming or diving medal per million people.
The Cubans are the team that you don't want to meet in a dark alley. They won 2.4 mpmp with 18 of their 27 medals coming in boxing, judo, taekwondo, and wrestling. Plus, I'm sure the gold medal winning baseball team could help out with their bats.
Zimbabwe took 2.2 mpmp, but they were all won by backstroker Kirsty Coventry (gold in the 200m backstroke, silver in the 100m backstroke, bronze in the 200m Individual Medley).
Fourteen other countries did better than 1 mpmp: Estonia, Slovenia, Jamaica, Hungary, Latvia, Bulgaria, Greece, Denmark, Belarus, the Netherlands, Norway, New Zealand, Croatia, and Slovakia.
The US ended up 41st out of the 75 medal-winning countries, with only a measley 0.37 mpmp, just behind Canada and Mongolia, and just ahead of Israel and Portugal. Here are the complete standings
India brought up the rear with just one silver medal (Rajyavardhan S. Rathore in the men's double trap) to show for its one-sixth of the world's population, although it can draw some solace from the fact that the two largest countries that did not win a single medal are its neighbors Pakistan and Bangladesh. Vaccinations for Olympic fever are apparently not required to visit the subcontinent, or at least while cricket is not an Olympic sport.
Kudos must also go to the Hungarian team, who led the way with 3 of the 7 medals stripped due to failure of drug tests. If you're gonna try to cheat, at least do it well enough to make a difference. They were men's hammer throw gold medalist Adrian Annus, men's discus gold medalist Robert Fazekas, and weightlifting silver medalist Ferenc Gyurkovics.
1 Comments:
Brent M. Here...
Why limit your study to just gold medals? How about you add up all the silvers and the bronzes also? Better yet, have a weighted medal count (gold = 3 points, silver = 2 points, bronze = 1 point or perhaps you could use their atomic weights)
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