Jonathan Kay: Meet the real Olympic leaders — New Zealand, Slovenia, Denmark, Australia and Mongolia
Ranking countries according to the number of Olympic medals they win seems silly to me: Even if you accept the idea that athletics is a surrogate for national greatness, how is it meaningful to compare enormous nations such as China or the United States with, say, Canada, Belgium or Gabon?
What would be more meaningful, it seems to me, is the number of medals a country wins compared to their population.
And so allow me to direct you to medalspercapita.com, where you will find just such a ranking.
Number one on the list: New Zealand, which has earned seven medals despite having a total population of just 4.4-million (that’s the size of one of China’s smaller cities). Put another way, New Zealand’s “population per medal” is just 633,231 (which is to say, one out of every 633,231 New Zealanders has won a medal at the 2012 Olympics).
Next up: Slovenia, Denmark, Australia and Mongolia.
On this index, Canada comes in 27th — right after … North Korea.
Note that the United States is 34th on this scale — with its 45 medals diluted by its 313-million-strong population (population-per-medal is almost 7-million for the United States, 10 times the figure in New Zealand).
China does even worse, thanks to its massive population: In China, population-per-medal is about 31-million. Which means that for all the vaunted Chinese strength at the Olympics, they have to sift through a sub-population the size of Canada’s entire population just to get one medal winner.
That’s not particularly impressive. In fact, New Zealand bests China on this scale by a geometric factor of 50.
And best of all, New Zealand child-athletes occasionally get to see their families.
What would be more meaningful, it seems to me, is the number of medals a country wins compared to their population.
And so allow me to direct you to medalspercapita.com, where you will find just such a ranking.
Number one on the list: New Zealand, which has earned seven medals despite having a total population of just 4.4-million (that’s the size of one of China’s smaller cities). Put another way, New Zealand’s “population per medal” is just 633,231 (which is to say, one out of every 633,231 New Zealanders has won a medal at the 2012 Olympics).
Next up: Slovenia, Denmark, Australia and Mongolia.
On this index, Canada comes in 27th — right after … North Korea.
Note that the United States is 34th on this scale — with its 45 medals diluted by its 313-million-strong population (population-per-medal is almost 7-million for the United States, 10 times the figure in New Zealand).
China does even worse, thanks to its massive population: In China, population-per-medal is about 31-million. Which means that for all the vaunted Chinese strength at the Olympics, they have to sift through a sub-population the size of Canada’s entire population just to get one medal winner.
That’s not particularly impressive. In fact, New Zealand bests China on this scale by a geometric factor of 50.
And best of all, New Zealand child-athletes occasionally get to see their families.
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