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This is not an entirely fair comparison. Each nation has a quota of the number of athletes for each sport it can send to the Olympics.

For example, in swimming, only two participants per nation are allowed. Some of the swimmers who got the 3rd place in US National Trials could even win bronze, but they cannot participate.

More often the case, there is only one national team allowed for a relay or team event. So even if China has 300 times the population of New Zealand, it can send the same number of teams and is limited to a maximum of one medal per event.

The methodology is biased against larger nations with a good pool of athletes.

It beyond that though, a lot of it down to the sports themselves and the way they're structured.

Look at swimming - if as a country you're great at swimming there are a boat load of medals you can win. Great at football or hockey on the other hand... two in each,- the men's event and women's event.

And that's before you get into sports that aren't even there - India would be in with a solid shot at a cricket medal but it's not an Olympic sport.

And because different countries have access to different facilities, different participation and interest levels the cultural differences that dictate these things can have a major impact.

Watching the Olympics has been great but while interesting, I'm not sure how much you can really learn from this sort of analysis.

China won all the table tennis gold medals. I got the impression from the commentary they they could probably field a team of players who missed selection and get the same result.
> For example, in swimming, only two participants per nation are allowed.

Really? http://www.usaswimming.org/ViewNewsArticle.aspx?TabId=0&...

But I think the point of this comparison is that everyone has the same chance of having an Olympic champion born in their country. Thus countries with more people have a better chance to get medals. This is just an attempt to even things out by diving medals over population. Not a perfect comparison by any means, but neither is just medal count when you compare China vs Grenada.
Olympic sailing also only allows each nation to qualify one crew for each type of boat used. The newly crowned Olympic Champion in the Finn class, Ben Ainslie, had a poor regatta at the 2011 Finn World Championships. However, his fellow countrymen still took first and third place overall.
I wonder if even adjusting for the amount of money (involving cost of living into the equation) would be a more fair way to adjust?
For me India is the biggest disappointment of them all. They promoted the hell out of Indian athletes in Olympics before the games. They also consider China to be their biggest competition in every level (economy/military/living standard).

Whenever I try to get in to discussion with my Indian friends in the most respectful manner and try to tell them China is several orders of magnitude ahead of India in most things; I get ridiculed or brushed aside.

I have found that there are two things you can never reason with, religion and nationalism.

You are right that India is something like 2 orders of magnitude behind China, and that their Olympic performance was horrendous.

However, 4 medals is actually an all-time record for India, a 33% improvement from last time and I believe only the 2nd time India has had more than one medal!

2 of the medals came from middle-class athletes, but the other 2 came from people born in remote villages. Things are improving, albeit extremely slowly.

May be you have met wrong sort of Indians (nationalistic) ? I along with nearly everyone I know - understands that India is far behind China. We truly suck as society. Rate badly on corruption, infrastructure, women, minority rights.

There is nothing to defend.

Don't put the blanket statement out there. In the case of China, they can be very nationalistic, but you only need to look on their weibo network to see how dissatisfied they are with the state of affairs inside China, whether on infrastructure safety, government corruption, wealth disparity, etc. edit: I mean to say here that nationalism does not necessitate blindness or irrationality.

That being said, India is taking some especially big kicks to the groin right now. What with the starving people due to inability to distribute an abundance of food, the massive power outages that have gained global attention, and disappointing economic performance compared to the other BRIC countries, maybe your Indian friends are more defensive right now precisely because they're hurting so much?

I noticed a disproportionate number of Indian names in mathematics (i.e. seemingly beyond even the huge population, though I haven't checked stats). I was told that mathematics is respected in India, and there are annual examinations for admittance to prestigious mathematics-focused schools. So at least they are nurturing that talent, more important than athletic ability (IMHO anyway).
A different take on this [1]:

> The human and financial costs of that, I believe, are something we as a nation can ill-afford.

[1] http://greatbong.net/2012/08/07/some-thoughts-on-the-olympic...

I concluded some time ago that nationalism is another form of religion.

Or at the very least they share many of the same irrational and sociological attributes.

I'm not so sure about the promotion part. I doubt if anybody realistically expected India's medal tally to be too different from what was achieved. I personally am quite happy with this, compared to what we got earlier and the kind of importance that sports (except cricket) get in mainstream Indian life.

Comparing India with China on Sports? - I think your friends are extremely nationalistic Indians.

Isn't part of it that there are relatively few Olympic sports that are big participation sports in India which really limits the pool India are drawing from?

Just offer to play the Chinese at cricket.

In India - it is just not possible to make a living out of athletics. It is largely true and partly just a perception problem. The only sport where you can make a comfortable living is basically Cricket and thats about it.

I know few of my friends who were state/national level table tennis and Badminton players but decided to let that thing go and opted for engineering degree because of pressure from parents etc.

Heck, I along with my friend are running a startup and one of the things my friend's dad asked is - "who will marry their daughter to you?". And this was for a brilliant embedded programmer who quit his regular to do this thing.

I can't imagine hardship (and hilarity) involved in finding prospective bride/groom for someone who "runs" for living. This thing is a no go clearly in Indian society.

It seems to me as an outsider as well that any kind of physical activity is generally looked down. Not absolutely but more in a 'if you don't have to, why would you' way.

Plus, it's so hot most of the time that any serious aerobic activity is difficult to maintain.

The Guardian have one of these too, with a link to download the data: http://www.guardian.co.uk/sport/datablog/interactive/2012/au...
The NYTimes have something similar too: http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2012/08/07/sports/olympic...
How about a weighing based on how many people play that sport (weekly, say)? And if one sport has many types of race, just divide up the new medal weight by how many events there are.

So if 50 million people play basketball per week and 1 million people swim, and if there is 1 basketball medal and 10 swimming medals, then a basketball medal would be valued at 50*10 of a swimming medal.

This way, new events & sports could be added easily, without changing things much. This would also reduce the bickering that happens whenever someone proposes adding or removing an event.

But then you have bickering over what you classify together as types. E.g. does diving belong to swimming? Hurdling together with marathons?
Would be interesting to see it adjusted for GDP and/or sport budgets per capita. In Australia we invest a lot of money in our sporting programs relative to our population size.
It seems we've spent just as much on preparing our athletes for London 2012[1] as the Phoenix mission to Mars [2]. So when are we launching a space probe into space? :-)

[1] $380 million - http://en.wikinews.org/wiki/No_surprises_for_sport_in_2012/2... [2] $386 million - http://www.aerospaceguide.net/mars/phoenixlander.html

Thanks for the idea, here it is: http://moshayedi.net/london2012/ranking-gdp.html
The Guardian has that as well http://www.guardian.co.uk/sport/datablog/interactive/2012/au...
Nitpick: the official name for "Holland" is (The) Netherlands.

Holland actually denotes only a part of the country and a lot of dutchmen do not take kindly to being called a "Hollander".

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holland

Nitpick++: the Netherlands is/are not taking part in the olympics; the kingdom of the Netherlands is (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kingdom_of_the_Netherlands)

Also: even London2012.com calls the home nation Great Britain, not the United Kingdom.

I really do not care when people call it Holland instead of The Netherlands. Enough Dutch people often refer to it as Holland.
Here's a site with more information and better presentation: http://www.medalspercapita.com/
You should have google'd it, this link has been spreading on Twitter and the UK websites like mad:

http://www.medalspercapita.com/

it has also spread in Australia because, well, check the results and you will see why.

One thing I never see considered in these types of rankings is the fact that in America, all the best athletes are tied up playing one of the four professional sports that make athletes a lot more money than the olympics ever will. For instance, Robert Griffen III, the new stud QB for the Redskins, was a world class hurdler in addition to being an all-star football player. Imagine how dominant the US would be in the Olympics if all its most athletically gifted professional athletes focused on an olympic event rather than their respective sports.
Already done here: http://www.medalspercapita.com/#weighted-per-capita:2012

and has more options too:

* per GDP

* per year (Beijing, etc.)

* per total medals

* per GOLD medal

* per weighted medal (4=gold, 2=silver, 1=bronze)

The Telegraph page that this is pulling data from is itself out of date by a couple of days. The official website might be a better source:

http://www.london2012.com/medals/medal-count/

I tried using that page, but they were resisting about automated bots by giving "Forbidden Request" reponses. I'll try to find a better source though.
Needs to be at least (reverse) adjusted by number of athletes per country (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2012_Summer_Olympics#Sorted_by_...).

This would reduce anomalies like Great Britain submitting approx. same number of atheletes as US, yet being less than a 6th in population size.

I doubt there is a way to adjust for submissions per sport and not sure it would be wise anyway since specialism can be viewed as a fair competitive advantage even if it suits the industralized or countries with older Olympic history more.

anyway you look at it, GB is doing fantastically well :)
How about adjusting by the number of Olympians per country?
There's an upper limit, and the bigger countries send all they can. (Unless with Olympian you mean something other than number of entrants?)
Why not adjusted the ranking by GDP? Sport investment has more to do with money than population.
Isn't the general consensus relevant predictor/measure the ability to fund full-time athletes? A much more interesting (and perhaps fairer) list of adjusted medal total would adjust for an economic measure (likely GNP or GDP).
Pretty cool.

One thing is that it's hard to anchor the figures to actual medal counts. I think normalising the data would be awesome. The normalisation should be such that sum(actual medals won) = sum(adjusted medals won).

I'd be interested in seeing a time series representation of this data, similar to http://www.gapminder.org
I would also like to see the ranking "By national pride sentiments" , as i'm pretty sure olympics performance is just a meaningless show.
How about this:

China only sent 621 athletes out of 1.3 billion people, and Brit has 1361 with a population of merely 62 million.

Adjusting by amount of money spent would be neat too.
The present ranking for golds is...

continental Europe 71

native English speakers 66

East Asia 56

Islamic nations 11

central & south America 10

Sub-Sahara 6

Needs error bars.