Summer Olympics: Country Medal Count vs. GDP

Kind of hard to find a better correlation with anything else in the real world. Kudos.

What's the formula? It looks like medal count might be a fractional exponent of GDP (assuming the cause and effect goes that way ). Any theories?

Likely some of the outliers are countries where the government heavily sponsors athletes. (Our athletes have to cough up tax money for any medals they win.)

I guess we can see who's juice'n ...? Although the lower GDP countries might come more into the picture by expanding the lower portion of the graph and compressing the higher part....also there should be some correlation between population, as a larger pool of athletes exists...

Interesting relationship, but understandable.

it wasn't always that way, but people usually go with the underdog...

• Eddie the Eagle.
• Jamaican Bobsled Team...
• And maybe this guy?...

They did the graph wrong. Metal count shouda been the Y axis. Idiots. My opinion.

Well sir, presented the way it is now, it clearly shows that if countries go out and win more medals, their GDP will go up. SPOOF!

It shows that GDP needs to be much higher in the U.S.A. than it is now, so we win all the medals, take the candy, and the b**ches.

If you flip abscissa and ordinate, it shows a diminishing return, and no significant increase in medal count above a given level of GDP.

More like a square root dependence than a squared dependence.

Just sayin.

Good points! I agree.

I listened to a program on BBC radio recently in which the factors affecting Olympic medal count were discussed, and they talked about a model using a number of independent variables, summarized below.

Economic Development -GDP per capita

Demographic Environment - Population size

Social Development - Human Development Index

The Human Political Environment -Political System

Geographic Environment - Hosting country

Previous Medal Tally - Number of Medals gained in previous years

Here is a paper from University of Kelaniya, Sri Lanka describing a similar model:

http://www.ijsrp.org/research-paper-0615/ijsrp-p4282.pdf

Money talks, B.S. takes a hike! Why do these countries always want to factor in all the liberal-minded PC crapola to justify their chitty social programs?

Hammer down like the Romans, walk like an Egyptian, and go out and kick some ass!

Here's an article on the BBC news website talking about the modelling I heard about:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-36955132

Summary (copied from the article):

Factors used by Bredtmann and colleagues

Past Olympic success: Medals won in the past can be seen as an indicator of "sports culture". Australia and the Netherlands for example always perform quite well, although they do not have a large population. Sporting prowess is important to them though, and many people take part in sport.

Host-country effect: The UK hosted the 2012 Olympics and won 65 medals compared to 47 at the previous Games. This is a recognised pattern. Performing in front of a home crowd, combined with extra investment in sport, gives the country a medals boost. At this year's Games, we would expect Brazil to benefit from this effect.

Future-host effect: Australia won 27 medals in 1992, but a full 41 medals four years later - probably due to increased investment in sport in the run-up to the 2000 Sydney Games. The UK, meanwhile, increased its medal haul from 30 to 47 between 2004 and 2008, prior to hosting the 2012 Games. Brazil, however, broke the pattern and did not perform particularly well at the 2012 Games. At this year's Games, we would expect Japan to benefit from the future-host effect.

Wealth: Countries with a high GDP, like Germany or the USA, can afford to invest in sports facilities, and their populations have enough leisure time and money to take part in sports. This may not be the case in poorer countries.

Population: A big population means a big talent pool to choose athletes from - in China's case, 1.36 billion people.

Planned economies: These countries tend to invest more in sport because they value the prestige that sporting success brings. China and Cuba are good examples. Countries that were formerly planned economies, such as Russia and Ukraine, may also continue to profit from these past efforts.

Majority-Muslim population: In majority-Muslim countries women are less likely to participate in sports and become athletes. Consequently, these countries usually send fewer or no female athletes, and fewer athletes means fewer chances to win medals.

I'm sure all that assists the medal winners. But first you need an athlete with potential.

And what's being reported, she can learn a new routine in days, where normally it takes months.

It all starts with the athlete, preferably a non PED enhanced one.

These are very interesting ideas. When I looked at the numbers though I didn't really see any correlations except for GDP. Population for instance was a very poor indicator of Olympic Success. I also looked at military size as a percent of population as a way of viewing the "planned economies" effect. I'm theorizing that planned economies interested in promoting prestige through sport also tend to have a disproportionately large military (North Korea for example). Pretty much no correlation, even worse than population.

The only things that seem to matter towards medal count, as far as I've seen, is Host Country which always seems to do better than normal and GDP. GDP is a remarkably good fit, thrown off only when a poor country has an exceptional athlete that wins a lot of medals.

The gender question is interesting and something I'd like to explore further. I'd love to investigate the ratio of men to women athletes from each country.

Oh, and of course - USA! USA! USA!

I appreciate the responses to this post. I just wanted to respond to a couple of things here. I've created another graph showing medal count vs. population (R²=.25). I think you'll see it doesn't track nearly as well as GDP(R²=.8).

Also, I've zoomed in to show that the 2nd order polynomial fit for the GDP graph is consistent at smaller scales (though noisier). Just click on the image below to get to the interactive graphs...

Roger,

I noticed the zoom controls are only active on the right hand graph. They don't appear on the left hand one.

I was attempting to zoom out to see countries at the high end of the spectrum, but wasn't able to on the population graph.

I'll take a look, thanks for the heads up!

Ok, that was actually an easy fix. At least I think I fixed it. Take a look and let me know. -R

Yes, that worked for me. Thanks

It's seems here a contraindicator....

With data like that, one may draw nearly any line whatsoever, and get R>0. Usually anything with R²<0.90 is considered to be pretty sketchy.

Another study with no surprises. Despite the seemingly lofty goals of the Olympics to allow ALL athletes to have a competitive stage, the truth is, most of the venues at the Olympics require the athlete to be either well supported by the athlete's government, or from a wealthy family, so the games are only for the rich, or rich countries. How is Bobaseta from Upper Slovonia to support himself while he trains 12 hours per day for a sport? His country can barely survive the enormous amount of money required to keep their army intact, let alone thinking of supporting an athlete in a sport no-one else in his country has even heard of.

Add to this, there is no promise of future income from the multitude of track, swimming, or gymnastic events, save sponsorship, so even an athlete from a country with a large GDP better be willing to sacrifice the future for a bit of glory now. Win a gold in gymnastics and what will you get? Maybe a place on a Wheaties box and an offer to announce at future Olympics. Win a silver, and even those 2 goals are not in reach. Better be rich if you plan to take up the true Olympic sports.

Nice post.

This week I was discussing with a coworker the potential relationship between population size and medal count. We also discussed the influence of economics.

One thing I don't think I've seen mentioned in the comments yet is geographic variation of each country. Some countries are not only small, but are geographically located in an area which limits natural development or interest in certain sports. For instance, land locked countries and swimming or mostly desert countries and winter sports come to mind.

While Nordic countries do quite well in the winter sports, they don't do quite so well in the summer ones.

Large countries such as the US, have an advantage in that there is a diverse environment as well as a large population (already mentioned).

Some countries with similar populations and similar GDPs may have quite different results in the Olympics due to not have geographic resources at hand to encourage interest in certain sports.

It would be interesting to see the analysis with a larger data set such as winter Olympics and more Olympic years (30 to 50?).

I can't do that analysis today, but I'll do it in the next week. I think it will be interesting to look at. I like the climate stuff you brought up too. Certainly the Nordic countries seem like they win a disproportionate about of medals in the winter Olympics. I'll check that out too.

It would be interesting to see a comparison of human rights ranking vs medal count....

https://freedomhouse.org/report/freedom-world/freedom-world-2015#.V631xJgrKUk

It might be interesting to see a plot, but I'm guessing there may be no relationship. Just have a look at the top 4 countries:

1. USA - 103 medals (high freedom and good human rights record)
2. China - 88 medals (low freedom and poor human rights record)
3. Russia- 79 medals (low freedom and poor human rights record)
4. UK - 65medals (high freedom and good human rights record)

It seems the most important factors are GDP and population and the country hosting the Olympics for that year gets a boost...

This is the prediction for this year...

http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1740-9713.2016.00915.x/full