I could get used to the Olympic Games on an every six months cadence! Another Olympics has come and gone so it is once again time to take a look at who “won” the Games by several different metrics. Per my previous posts, I continue to use a weighted scoring system to tally up Olympic medals by country. This year I once again tracked not just the medal counts but also economic and demographic metrics for each country – you can see my full spreadsheet here.
20 more medals (327 in total) were given at these Olympics games than were given four years ago (307). That continues a strong trend (291 in 2014 and 217 in 2010) of more than 50% growth over a little more than a decade – talk about inflation!
Norway has benefited from the added events and repeated this year as the clear victor in weighted medal score, total medals, and gold medals. They weren’t quite as dominant as they were in 2018, when they also won the most silvers and bronzes, but they were still way ahead of second place. The top performers by weighted medal score were:
117 – Norway
95 – Germany
80 – ROC*
77 – USA
60 – Sweden
60 – Austria
Russia is still banned from Olympic competition and for good reason as they have at least one doping controversy already. If they lose a medal due to that instance, their athletes will slip from third to fourth but they really shouldn’t be counted anyway; Allowing Russia to compete as “Russian Olympic Committee” is a farce of a penalty for their systematic cheating.
Because Norway is so small, it crushed the competition even (especially!) when normalized by population. The top performers by weighted medal score per million citizens were:
21.59 – Norway
10.10 – Slovenia
6.67 – Austria
5.94 – Sweden
5.32 – Switzerland
These countries are mostly pretty affluent, though, so how do things change if we normalize instead by GDP? Not much! The top performers by weighted medal score per $B GDP (PPP) were:
0.31 – Norway
0.24 – Slovenia
0.12 – Austria
0.10 – Sweden
0.07 – Finland
We can mix up the leaderboard a little bit if we normalize by GDP per capita. The top performers by weighted medal score per $1,000 GDP per capita were:
3.19 – China
2.70 – ROC*
1.70 – Norway
1.68 – Germany
1.12 – USA
1.10 – Canada
Many congratulations to Norway, a small country that absolutely crushed much larger and richer countries than itself at this year’s Olympics – well done! Keep up the good (and, as far as we know, clean) work and we’ll hope to give you more competition in four years!