2024 Olympic Medal Tally on a per capita basis

Current as of 10:30 AEST, August 2, 2024.

Those of you following along with the Olympics, or even those of you not following along with the Olympics (indeed, really just anyone who is not living under a rock), have likely become well familiar with the Olympic medal tally. As of 10:30 AEST, it looked something like this (live tally available here):

Perhaps you don’t care much about this tally and are more following along with the Olympics for the pure spectacle of it (you can read more why we enjoy the Olympics here), or perhaps you are religiously checking to see if your country has any updates. Or perhaps, you are just generally fascinated by the tally in general as an insight into different countries and what sports different countries prioritise/are good at. But such a tally of course does not tell the whole story. Factors such as cultural experiences around sport, funding and support given to athletes and government commitment to nurturing talent, of course make a huge difference. And then, of course, there’s the matter of population.

The leading nations, China and the US, have populations of 1,425,671,352 and 339,996,563 respectively based on data from the United Nations Population Division estimates. Third placed France, on the other hand, only has a population of 64,756,584, about 20% of the population of the US and 5% the population of China. Australia, in fourth place, has a population equivalent to roughly 8% of the US and 2% of China. This got us thinking: what exactly would the medal tally look like if arranged by number of medals per capita? We get the feeling that Australia punches well above its weight when it comes to Olympic success, but can this feeling be quantified by statistics?

Before we display our findings, there are a couple of things to note about our rankings. We ranked countries in three ways: first, based on gold medal tally per capita; second, based on total medal tally per capita; and third, based on total points per capita using a weighted ranking system. We note, however, that such rankings are not without controversy. There is even disagreement within the third category of weighted ranking system relating to how each medal should be weighted. For example, the New York Times weighted point system assigns 4 points to gold, 2 to silver and 1 to bronze in comparison to a simple weighted system which only assigns 3 points to gold. Formally, the International Olympic Committee does not explicitly state which weighting method is preferable. The live tally goes off total gold medals rather than a weighted tally. Hence, we’ve decided to just include three separate rankings, which compare all 50 countries which had won a medal at the time this article was last updated. For our weighted ranking, we’ve opted for a simple weighted system (3:2:1). So for the top 10 current countries, the numbers look something like this:

Ranking-wise, that looks like this:

Nothing too surprising about those tallies right? Now, let’s bring total population into play. That’s were things start to get interesting.

When each of those tallies is expressed as a number per 10 million people, the figures look something like this:

Tells a bit of a different story right? So here’s how the rankings look based on medals/capita:

Interesting, hey? But if you look closely, you will notice that some countries in the overall rankings still rank highly when medals are expressed on a per capita basis. France for example, comes in 9^th when gold medals are ranked per 10 million people and for total medals per 10 million people. However, there is only one country which makes it into all 6 top 10 rankings. Yep, that’s right: it’s Australia! We come in fourth ranked by Olympic gold medals and weighted medal tally and fifth for total medals. And that doesn’t change much even when medals are expressed per capita.  We’re third for gold medals per capita, and 5^th for total medals per capita and weighted total medals per capita. Not bad Australia! Turns out we were right: Australia really does punch above its weight when it comes to world sport. And let’s not forget our neighbours in New Zealand and Fiji! Pretty incredible performances!

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