Olympic Games Won By Jamaica!
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:
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. |
4 Responses to “Olympic Games Won By Jamaica!”
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[...] Donc voilà. Histoire de troller sur les terrasses, ne pas être d’accord avec les stats et voir midi à sa porte, allez voir chez Elliott Back. Il montre via calcul de la BBC que chacun peut comptabiliser les médailles à son avantage. [...]
Hi Elliott,
Cool Graph!
I found this widget that displays the numbers in a more interactive way.
I think you might like it:-)
http://www.clearspring.com/widgets/48abc6bc903b61d0
Go Jamaica:-)
That widget is neat. I only looked at the top 20, otherwise the Bahamas might have shown up
I like this approach to ranking the countries. It shows the real situation and the talented country))