Smaller countries can also get disproportionate representation in the olympics. When there's one team or competitor per country, the smallest country has the highest per-capita representation. While they have a smaller pool of athletes to draw from, I'd bet it changes the potential outcome where a straight up per-capita medal count is also somewhat misleading.
I wonder what medals per competitor per capita would look like?
Small samples have high variance, while sample mean approaches the mean of the true population as you increase the sample size.
This is a fun website, but the Olympics would need a lot more events for it to mean something. If each athlete were only allowed to compete in a single event, then it might be insightful for countries at least as successful at capturing medals as, say, Great Britain.
I'll be Phelps' hometown has a crazy medal count per capita.
Definitely. A similar example: at one point studies started coming out that showed the best performing schools were small. Cue a lot of noise on how small schools are better, if you want your kids to be successful, send them to a small school, etc. I think these findings even showed up in government reports/recommendations.
Problem is, the worst performing schools were also small. Almost all of the effect could be explained by higher variance.
Unfortunately I don't remember where where I read about this, wish I could provide sources.
EDIT: found it. It wasnt government, it was the Gates foundation, who spent billions into supporting smaller schools.
This is a beautiful article. Though I've read a number of reports that the higher male variance isn't all it was thought to be, but can't find it again. There should be done interesting studies about the variance in different species whose gender differentiation is done by a different mechanism, namely where the female has the two different chromosomes.
While the research wasn't performed by the government, I think its the basis for the move toward small "schools-within-schools" as an educational "reform" in a number of public schools.
How would one regularize to account for such variability (in a way that doesn't discount and favor the performance of small and large countries respectively)?
Genuine question as I'm admittedly not very familiar with the mathematical/statistical aspects of this. I am however mildly satisfied with my home country's per-capita performance in this and prior summer olympics, and curious to learn if/why I maybe shouldn't be :)
You could use a Bayesian model to incorporate prior information about the distribution of global medal rates into a conclusion (a posterior) about a particular country. This explanation will be simple and empirical, but ideally you'd integrate over all country-level data and the prior at once.
Count data is nice to model with a Poisson distribution, and a conjugate Gamma prior distribution. We'll assume a lot of things about the distribution of medal rates and medals which probably aren't true in reality.
For the global prior, eyeballing the medals-per-capita list for all countries, it has mean value around 3E-7 and standard deviation about 5E-7. That corresponds very roughly to the distribution Gamma(0.25, 1E6) for the prior. A Gamma with parameters (a, b) has mean value a/b and standard deviation sqrt(a)/b, so I just matched the numbers.
For a country with N medals and P population, we want to update our posterior distribution of their medal-per-capita rate based on a Gamma(0.25, 1E6) prior and a Poisson distribution. The updated posterior distribution is conveniently, Gamma(0.25+N, 1E6+P). (That's the conjugacy property).
So Grenada's medal rate, with N=1, P=100,000, has posterior distribution Gamma(1.25, 1.1E6). This has mean value 1.25/1.1E6 = 1.1E-6. Compare that mean value to the raw medal-per-capita rate of 1E-5 - in other words, if this model is to be believed, we should heavily discount Grenada's great performance. On the other hand Australia's medal rate barely changes from 9.2E-7 to 9.7E-7 by using the prior, close to Grenada's Bayesian rate. So it takes a larger population into account quite naturally.
There's a few things there too, consider for every Grenada with one medalist how many small countries have none which can kind of add to that pool of participants.
The other thing is that in most sports each country is limited to the same number of participants. In swimming for example if the US had the 4 of the best 10 swimmers in an event only two get to compete at the Olympics which leaves them at a slight disadvantage.
I think 10 million is the clear winner. Any thing less than that is clearly not even a country, more a large city. And cities can't perform in the Olmypics. So who does that put on top?
What I'm looking for is a chart of total medals vs. possible medals.
For example, for a country that only has one athlete in one sport, their total possible medals is 1. So if they get 1 medal, they have a 100% success rate, which is pretty good.
I've seen charts of total medals vs # of athletes participating, but that's not quite right, because it doesn't account for team sports. One country might have 4 people on the swim relay team, but that's still only one possible medal (and if they win it should only count as one).
I suspect someone will link me directly to what I'm looking for soon, but I've yet to find it on my own.
The breakdown by team vs. individual, and then unique individual athletes with medals would be interesting.
Weight Phelps and a bronze Judo winner equally, in order to better capture the individual talent and reduce "talent stacking" of having a single athlete winning 10 variations on swimming.
Yeah swimming is sort of combinatorially ridiculous. They really ought to be able to get by with two strokes rather than four. Backstroke and freestyle would make the most aesthetic sense to me, because I don't really see the point in a race using an inherently slower technique but I can see the point of going backwards. However, don't add a bunch of sidestroke races!
I've always thought butterfly was a bizarre event. It's one of the most complicated strokes, and it's slower and more tiring than the front crawl. As far as I'm concerned, it's an arbitrary stroke.
I guess a lot of Olympic sports are arbitrarily limited though, walking and triple jump come to mind.
Yes the butterfly is egregious. At least the breaststroke is a rational refinement of the largely instinctive (even for humans) dog-paddle, and had a long history as a modern racing stroke before Native Americans taught everyone that the crawl was faster. Even fairly poor swimmers can breaststroke for long distances. The butterfly seems like a bizarro version of the breaststroke, slightly faster but much more difficult and exhausting. They could add any additional arbitrary requirement to the butterfly, and the result wouldn't really be more arbitrary than it already is.
Perhaps swimming should take weightlifting as an example. This discipline requires lifters to perform two lifting techniques, the "snatch" and the "clean and jerk", and combines those to get the final result. This is similar to "medley" swim races, which may be a reasonable compromise between the current four-stroke insanity and eliminating stroke requirements altogether.
Walking is at least a natural gait. Triple jump is a single event, so it doesn't have the multiplicative effects that swimming strokes have.
But all sports are bizarre if you boil them down in this way. They all rely on arbitrary limitation of participants or equipment to prevent them descending into a total free-for-all and becoming pointless. Its the same thing as art being about constraints - its having to deliver within certain 'arbitrary' bounds that make it a challenge and make it worthwhile.
Butterfly is actually the second-fastest stroke, at least over the shorter distances. There have been swimmers in the past that have used the butterfly stroke in freestyle races at high level events.
I just noticed India has no medals. Can someone with more knowledge on this perhaps shed some light? Of the remaining sports are there any that India is a medal contender? I find it odd that a country with more than 1.2 billion would go through the olympics empty handed.
Excuses, Excuses. When DPRK, Bahamas, Bahrain, UAE, Brunei can win medals. There is no sound logic for any reason the apologists present for India not winning medals. Incompetence across the board (with an exception of some real hard working athletes). Phelps has more medals than India in its entire Olympics participation. Shame. Shame. Shame.
edit: if downvoting me to hell is going to give a bronze medal to India, then please down-vote me to oblivion.
#1. I am old enough and tired enough to not worry about Karma points. People are free to down-vote, I am just trying to get a point across.
#2. The article is not deep, it rings like shallow talking point of India not getting medal apologists.
#3. Incompetence from head to toe. There are multiple factors, but to simplify and make it sound like a single problem issue, the biggest impediment to Indian sports are Indian Olympic Committee and Ministry of Sports, are primarily plump political posts.
#4. No number of explanations can convince me there is a method behind the madness of 1.2 billion people that too a majority under the age of 30, cannot win one bronze medal.
To win one bronze medal, you really do not need Nike or University of Oregon track and field program. Smaller nations that are far more corrupt than India were pulling medals and India did not. This is not a one off, India has remained at the bottom of medal tally for long time, Bejing and London gave some hope because of multiple medals, and now reverting to big ZERO is disheartening and maddening at the same time.
While I agree that the article makes some very cliche points that are not supported by data, the same can be said about your comment, which has already been pointed out by others.
For example, the article mentions caste, buts fails to notice that most of the athletes are not affluent people from upper castes. The kids going into cricket are from relatively well off families who are able to afford kits. However, The archery team's top people are mostly from tribal backgrounds. Also most of the people in the wrestling and boxing teams are from lower-middle/working class OBC backgrounds. I'm assuming the same can be said for a lot of sports like track and field, weightlifting etc. (the exceptions being sports like tennis, badminton etc.)
Sport does present a good opportunity for many people from poorer backgrounds, who are able get jobs in public sector companies, for their sporting achievements. So these athletes have plenty of motivation to do well, and follow their prescribed training in a disciplined manner.
What needs to be examined is how effective the sports administration is in various levels in identifying and supporting the athletes. Going by the results, they are not effective at all. So logically they have to take most of the blame.
Edit: Also the article mentions good things about India's achievements in cricket. There again we have a very mediocre team which has a very difficult time playing in unfamiliar conditions outside India. However, I have heard good things of late, so that may be changing. So there may be some truth to the statement that our country produces some very mediocre-middling sportsmen irrespective of the facilities given to them.
Try other years. The official Olympic medal database is somewhat awkward to use [1][2], but volunteers at Wikipedia have aggregated the data [3][4].
Prior to 2016, their latest gold medal was earned in 2008 and that year they earned 3 medals total, and prior to that in 1980, in which year they earned 1 medal total.
Looking back at previous years doesn't really paint a better picture. Winning one gold medal in three decades isn't exactly what most people expect from the world's second most populous nation.
The Indian culture does not value athletics or physical fitness activities (or medical health, for that matter) as much as other countries. And it is showing.
After spending a month there in March, I agree totally. EVERY adult male has a giant gut, and beyond their early 20's the women are all over weight as well. I was not really expecting that.
Obesity is not the issue causing this. India has an almost billion person population with a 15% obesity rate with 0 medals while the US has a 33% obesity rate with 80 medals and a third of the population.
Funding and culture are the biggest issues. The only sport Indians care about and that you can financially support yourself professionally is in cricket. Unsurprisingly India is quite good at cricket and would def. have some medals if it was an Olympic sport.
The truth is that indian has millions of potential athletes who never pursue their passion because they are pressured by parents to focus on academics and other areas. There is no culture glorifying athletes. The few who do end up being athletes play cricket.
I never said anything about obesity causing the issue with athletics. I was agreeing that the general Indian population doesn't seem to value fitness or health. Which from my limited experience, is absolutely true.
Which just reinforces the original statement, that India doesn't give a shit about fitness/athleticism. We value sports highly in the states, thus we have a large talent pool.
Welp, I spent time time in Chennai, Pondicherry, Bangalore, Mumbai, Jaipur, Pushkar, Agra, and New Delhi. Interacted with hundreds, and hundreds of people on job sites. I'm not sure what else I need to see to support my visual inspection of the Indian population.
You saw like 0.0000001% of the population and feel like you have a justified opinion? Wow. Well, personally I'd be embarrassed to say so, but to each his own.
If you're doing random sampling* then the proportion of the population sampled doesn't really matter if the population is very large. The margin of error is entirely dominated by the absolute sample size and true value of the underlying statistic being measured.
1.25 billion people in India. There are starving people in every country, but you can still have a majority population being overweight. Just like any modern industrial country.
People talk as if an average Indian spends 14 hours a day in a library. There is clearly talent like Dipa Karmakar who was not facilitated with right kind of training facility or equipment, she missed medal by whisker. The stories of Indian athletes doing training by themselves and begging for equipment is now legendary.
Sure but you would expect a few exceptional exceptions when dealing with 1.25 billion people. Also India is a huge melting pot with people from different ethnic and cultural backgrounds. I just don't see how this can be the only reason.
They could limit it to four teams. I'm no cricket player, but surely they could get in three games in two weeks?
Yes many nations with marginal cricket teams (perhaps including India?) would complain that they were left out, but similar unfairness happens in every Olympic discipline, e.g. when the top five in the world are from one nation that can only send one competitor.
The real popular cricket in india that I grew up playing is one tip catch out cricket. It can be played in minutes, with as few people as beach volleyball. Also if you hit the ball out of the playground or lose the ball, you are out!
It wouldn't be suitable for the general public, but here's how I would do the comparison for potential:
- assume a normal distribution of innate ability.
- assume a different normal distribution of each individual's variation in scoring (all with an expected value of zero and identical variance, smaller than that of innate ability)
- assume each nation picks its best athletes in trials (doesn't really happen; for example, Bolt wouldn't have qualified for Rio if Jamaica did that)
What you will get is that China and India should each have about 15% of the best performers. However, top performers of other large countries will not be far behind them in innate ability, so that there is a decent chance that their form of the day will make them beat better players. Also, most of the best athletes will live in countries with large populations, and most of those will not make it to the Olympics because they get beaten by their compatriots in qualification, either because of lack of innate ability or due to 'luck'.
End result I guess will be that each country that is large enough (pure guess: 50 million+, say Argentina, Britain, Colombia, France, Germany, Kenya, South Korea or anything larger) should, aan else being equal, get about the same number of medals.
Of course, not all else is equal. Any difference will be due to other factors:
- sport-mindedness (example: New Zealand)
- money invested (example: Great Britain, Qatar (a country that _buys_ Olympic champions)
- genetic make-up (example: Fiji in rugby)
- culture (example: table tennis and China, or India as a negative example for almost any sport that isn't cricket or field hockey)
- religion (many countries send a token female athlete because they have to, thus giving up about 50% of their potential number of medals)
Those are hard to quantify, and can change significantly over time. Britain is an extreme example, with 1 (one!) gold medal at the 1996 Olympics. Lottery money has changed that tremendously, not only for the home Olympics in London.
A final factor is that countries that are willing to spend money will influence what sports become Olympic sports. I don't think it is accidental that there are so many events in athletics and swimming, two sports that the US excels at. Advertising money buys events.
> A final factor is that countries that are willing to spend money will influence what sports become Olympic sports. I don't think it is accidental that there are so many events in athletics and swimming, two sports that the US excels at. Advertising money buys events.
I don't doubt that advertising plays a role in which events exist, but athletics and swimming have had lots of events since the dawn of the Olympics, probably because they're easy to set up and they don't take a long time to run. If you were trying to get the US more medals, you might have 3-on-3 basketball, 1-on-1 basketball, 12 minute basketball, H.O.R.S.E., a dunk contest, etc.
Sic transit gloria mundi: Finland's at the top of the all-time rankings, but doesn't have a single medal so far in 2016 (although there's an unexpected one coming up in female boxing, as an essentially unknown boxer just beat the world champion and semifinalists are guaranteed at least a bronze).
It's a bit harder to estimate, it's like evaluating NASA and ROSCOSMOS, NASA's budget is considerably larger but it's not necessarily "less efficient" just because each mission costs more.
Olympic medals per portion of GDP spent on sports education and the olympic team in each country might be a better method.
Also a good metric is how much effort/cost does it take to get into the olympic team of each country, the US is somewhat special in this case since in some cases one needs to break a world record just to get pass the team's trials since they have a huge pool of athletes competing for spots.
But the US is an outlier in general, it's pretty much the only country where you can live as a semi-pro athlete and actually make money, college sports are better funded than most professional sports leagues in other countries (NCAA has a 700M club pool, UEFA champions league has a club pool of about 700M EURO's), and college athletic scholarships exist for virtually every sport.
Unfortunately, there is no easily accessible API to get Olympic medal data, so the creator of this website undoubtedly has to do some semi-manual data input.
I wonder what medals per competitor per capita would look like?