Recently I posted about the United States’ dominance of the all-time Olympic medal lists (hey, I’m a Merkan – give me a break). But there are some things that can be analyzed a bit more closely.

Firstly, the United States is the world’s 3^rd most populous country, after China and India. It would stand to reason that a country with more people would have a larger pool from which to draw great athletes. The US is also the world’s 3^rd (or possibly 4^th) largest country, after Russia and Canada, although not certain if that has any effect. (China and the United States are almost the exact same size and sometimes China is listed the 3^rd largest nation.)

Secondly, the United States is a wealthy country, with the world’s largest gross domestic product (GDP). Again, a country with great wealth has several advantages in terms of producing great athletes and Olympic medalists. Not only is there more money to support the athletes, theoretically, but people from wealthy nations typically have more leisure time allowing them to train more for sports.

So let’s look at the Olympic medal lists in a couple different ways. Remember that North America and Europe/International analyze medal lists differently – in North America the nations are ranked by 1) medals, 2) gold, 3) silver, and 4) bronze; while in Europe they are ranked by 1) gold, 2) silver, and 3) bronze. So we’ll compare lists both by total medals won and gold medals won (we can’t use silver and bronze well in the analysis that will follow).

Second, a caveat is in order. We are going to eliminate any nations that no longer exists – you’ll see why soon.

We will then look at medals won in terms of 1) medals won per capita, or divided by the nation’s population, to eliminate the advantage gained by larger nations; 2) medals won per GDP, to eliminate the advantage gained by wealthier nations; and 3) medals won per GDP per capita, which is probably a better way to measure a nation’s wealth.

Here is the basic top 25 medal list, uncorrected, with ranks on the left both in US system and the European system:

This is as we noted, with the USA on top, in both systems. We will eliminate the Soviet Union, Federal Republic of Germany (West), German Democratic Republic (East), and other non-extant nations, such as Yugoslavia and Czechoslovakia. The reason now becomes more obvious – we are using current figures for population (2014) and gross domestic product (2013), and those figures don’t exist any more for those nations, and there is no good way to extrapolate to them. Here are the population, GDP, and GDP per capita figures (Source: US CIA Factbook) for the top 25 nations on the “raw” medal list:

NLE=No Longer Exists

Here is what happens if we look at medals and gold medals per million population:

One thing of note above – the top nations are predominately winter sports nations. Liechtenstein, in particular, owes all of its medals to two winter sports families – the Wenzels and the Frommelts. Also, if you look at the two lists above, they are quite similar when using both ranking systems.

Now let’s look at how the nations do if we compare medals won per GDP, in million $:

Again, the lists are similar, although Jamaica leads in terms of medals won per capita while Hungary leads in terms of gold medals won per capita. But Jamaica, Bulgaria, Cuba, and Hungary are in the top 5 on both systems.

Finally, looking at the medal lists in terms of GDP per $1,000 per capita:

Again, many of the “standard” powerful Olympic nations come out on top by this analysis – with China 1^st and the United States 2^nd. The main reason for this is that while population and GDP differ by several magnitudes among nations, there is not the same magnitude of difference in terms of GDP per capita, which varies from $102,100 per person for Qatar, down to about $1,000 for the very poor nations. But many of those nations have never won an Olympic medal.