Asia Blog: China, Japan, Korea, Vietnam

Olympic Games Won By Jamaica!

Posted in Olympics by Elliott Back on August 24th, 2008.

If you organize the top-20 from the official medal table, and normalize the raw counts by the size of each country, Jamaica (with just 2.7M people) is the decisive winner:

medals.png

Canada doesn’t do badly either, in 10th place. China, unfortunately, given its massive size, ends up last. So, given the recent controversy over “who won the olympics,” what is the best way to do these medal rankings? Total medals? Total golds? Normalized totals? Whichever way you go, someone is going to be unhappy.

Check out this Foreign Policy article How many ways are there to count Olympic medals? where they compare using a gold-is-worth-more weighted ranking with the current US/International methods. Another good take is BBC’s Five alternative Olympics medals tables, or Danwei’s Chinese media calls the Olympics for China. Depending who ask, China won or the US won the Olympics.

I prefer to say Canada won :)

Addendum of Data

Nation Size Size Norm Gold Silver Bronze Total Normalized Total
Jamaica 2,780,132 0.002103 6 3 2 11 5230.101
Australia 20,434,176 0.015459 14 15 17 46 2975.661
Belarus 9,724,723 0.007357 4 5 10 19 2582.612
Netherlands 16,491,461 0.012476 7 5 4 16 1282.459
Great Britain 60,776,238 0.045978 19 13 15 47 1022.226
South Korea 49,044,790 0.037103 13 10 8 31 835.5099
France 64,473,140 0.048775 7 16 17 40 820.0946
Germany 82,400,996 0.062338 16 10 15 41 657.7096
Ukraine 46,299,862 0.035027 7 5 15 27 770.8447
Canada 33,390,141 0.02526 3 9 6 18 712.5856
Russia 141,377,752 0.106954 23 21 28 72 673.1847
Spain 40,448,191 0.0306 5 10 3 18 588.2422
Italy 58,147,733 0.04399 8 10 10 28 636.5141
Kenya 31,987,000 0.024199 5 5 4 14 578.5452
Romania 22,276,056 0.016852 4 1 3 8 474.7167
United States 301,139,947 0.227817 36 38 36 110 482.8443
Japan 127,433,494 0.096405 9 6 10 25 259.3219
Ethiopia 70,678,000 0.053469 4 1 2 7 130.9172
China 1,321,851,888 1 51 21 28 100 100

This entry was posted on Sunday, August 24th, 2008 at 4:28 pm and is tagged with olympics medals, alternative olympics, olympic medals, who won the olympics, jamaica 2, raw counts, olympic games, medal table, chinese media, massive size, gold silver, policy article, south korea, 7m, foreign policy, olympics, bbc, controversy, norm, great britain. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback.

 

Trackbacks

(Trackback URL)

close Reblog this comment
Powered by Disqus · Learn more
blog comments powered by Disqus

Please take time to enjoy the archives: October 2008 (4) September 2008 (3) August 2008 (5) July 2008 (5) June 2008 (3) May 2008 (3) April 2008 (1) March 2008 (4) January 2008 (3) December 2007 (1) November 2007 (2) October 2007 (3) September 2007 (1) August 2007 (2) July 2007 (8) June 2007 (4) May 2007 (5) April 2007 (3) March 2007 (3) February 2007 (6) January 2007 (6) December 2006 (7) November 2006 (3) October 2006 (6) September 2006 (2) August 2006 (6) July 2006 (8) June 2006 (6) May 2006 (4) April 2006 (12) March 2006 (4) February 2006 (17) January 2006 (9) December 2005 (5) November 2005 (4) October 2005 (8) September 2005 (1) August 2005 (4) July 2005 (4) June 2005 (4) May 2005 (3) April 2005 (8) March 2005 (11) February 2005 (2) January 2005 (7) December 2004 (10) November 2004 (9)

Fresh, related resources:

Supplied by Google Blog Search
  • Today in New York: Carrie Rodriguez Shows off Her Impressive Alt b.../b
    Hockey: Team GB Shows Improvement But Remain Out of the bOlympic/b ... Bleacher Report, CA - 1 hour ago. We could have bwon/b both bgames/b. Romania, they weren’t very good, but they were missing a few key players in that game. b.../b
  • Best Pictures of Year 2008 - Part 4 | Quality Junkyard
    Giovanna Trillini of Italy and Nam Hyunhee of South Korea compete in the semifinals of the women’s individual foil fencing event at the Fencing Hall on Day 3 of the Beijing 2008 bOlympic Games/b on August 11, 2008 in Beijing, China. b.../b
  • Japan to launch project to enhance competitiveness of Olympians b.../b
    A national project to enhance the competitiveness of Japan’s bOlympic/b athletes is poised to kick off in April with the aim of boosting the country’s medal count toward the 2016 Summer bGames/b, which Tokyo is bidding to host. b.../b
  • Nine Topics in 2009 : PreRaceJitters.com
    The Kenyan bOlympic/b champion is still relatively inexperienced at 800 meters, with a major upside. Liu Xiang’s Comeback After a disappointing withdraw from the Beijing bGames/b, Xiang subsequently underwent surgery successful surgery in b.../b
  • NO DAYS OFF!: Michael Phelps SIGNS $1 MILLION Car DEAL b.../b
    bOlympic/b swimmer Michael Phelps is golden in China again. First he bwon/b a record eight gold medals at the Beijing bGames/b. Now Phelps is getting more than $1 million to be a spokesman for Mazda in China, the largest single sponsorship for b.../b