The US and China have dominated the medal table at the Paris Games, but other countries – small or poor – have achieved spectacular success. An extreme case this year was the island of Saint Lucia, with just 200,000 inhabitants, which took home two medals with sprinter Julien Alfred.
How can we fairly measure Olympic merit? There are many nuances, but the main thing is to take into account the advantage that two variables give: being a country with a large population (because it helps you win the genetic lottery of sporting talent) and being a country as rich as possible (to develop that talent).
The first chart shows the winners in total medals and also in medals per capita.
The chart shows the absolute winners, with the USA (126 metals) and China (91) in the lead, followed by the United Kingdom (65), France (64), Australia (53) and Japan (45).
But the countries that are successful in terms of their population are more interesting: Dominica, Grenada and Saint Lucia have more than 10 medals per million inhabitants, between 20 and 40 times more than countries like Spain (0.4 per million) or the USA (0.4). Other countries with great performance are Jamaica (2.1), Australia (2), Hungary (2), the Netherlands (1.9) and New Zealand (3.9).
Looking at this list, it is easy to remember another variable that predicts sporting success: wealth. Countries with the highest Gross Domestic Product (GDP) per capita win more medals per inhabitant, as shown in the following graph. But by crossing these two variables we can find a lot of exceptional countries that achieve better results than what corresponds to their size and economic level.
The most extreme performance is achieved by some Caribbean islands: Dominica, Grenada, Saint Lucia or Jamaica have many more medals than one would expect from middle-income and tiny countries. It is a pattern that has been repeated for decades. For example, Jamaica has won 83 medals since 2004, which pulverizes countries of similar size and income, such as Costa Rica (3 medals), Albania (2) or Lebanon (1).
Australia and New Zealand are still successful even after adjusting for GDP. Also striking is the number of medals won by some former Soviet republics, such as Kyrgyzstan (all in conflict), Georgia and Armenia. In Europe, the Netherlands also stands out, with almost 2 medals per million inhabitants.
One caution with this second chart is that highly populated countries are at a disadvantage. They have a hard time winning many medals per capita, because they don’t send as many athletes as their population would require – otherwise one in three would be Chinese and Indian. For example, Ireland took 125 athletes to Paris and Spain 336, even though our population is almost 10 times larger. China? It took 423 athletes, just 20% more than Spain, even though its population is 30 times larger.
The advantage of being a host
It is a cliché that holds true: when a country hosts the Games, it usually improves its medal tally. France has gone from 33 medals in Tokyo to 62 in Paris, confirming a rule that has few exceptions. Spain broke its record in Barcelona 1992, as did Australia in Sydney 2000, Greece in Athens 2004, China in Beijing 2008 and Japan in Tokyo 2020.
These figures show Spain’s poor performance at these games. It has won 18 medals, 1.7% of the total, which is better than the figure for Tokyo (17 and 1.6%), but is still far from the 22 medals won in 1992, which were 2.7% of the total. There was no karate in Paris, where Spain won a gold and a silver four years ago. But in this edition there was another advantage: there were hardly any Russian competitors, which left about seventy medals for 2020 “free”. This absence surely explains something we see in the graph above: almost all countries have improved their number of medals since the previous cycle.
Many studies have analysed why hosting the games helps to win medals. They highlight factors such as the investment in sports and infrastructure prior to the competition, the benefit of competing at home, sending more athletes than usual or automatically classifying team sports.
Since the 2020 Tokyo Games, the International Olympic Committee has also invited host countries to propose new sports. The hope is that they will choose disciplines that are popular in their country, where they are more likely to win and attract an audience to the events. In Japan, skateboarding, karate, sport climbing and windsurfing have been introduced. The result? Japan won five medals in skateboarding, three in karate, two in climbing and two in surfing. In 2024, the new sport is breaking, where France has won one of the six medals available.
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