[OC] The relationship between 2024 GDP (per capita) and Olympic medal count (2004-2020)

[OC] The relationship between 2024 GDP (per capita) and Olympic medal count (2004-2020)

Posted by atoziye_

6 comments
  1. (re-posted due to an error with the previous title)

    **Data source:** official Olympics website via Kaggle ([here](https://www.kaggle.com/datasets/samruddhim/olympics-althlete-events-analysis) and [here](https://www.kaggle.com/datasets/arjunprasadsarkhel/2021-olympics-in-tokyo)) and the official [IMF website](https://www.imf.org/external/datamapper/NGDP_RPCH@WEO/OEMDC/ADVEC/WEOWORLD).

    **Tools:** I used [Formula Bot’s Data Prep tool](https://formulabot.com/) to aggregate and wrangle the datasets into a final dataset. I then used RStudio (ggplot2) to produce the visualizations from this final dataset.

    The final dataset and the R code for the plots are available for download on [GitHub](https://github.com/atoziye/GDP-and-Olympics). Additionally, you can read about this and more data-driven Olympic insights at our [blog post here](https://formulabot.com/blog/olympic-wealth-gdp-country-sport-dominance-correlation).

    edit: because if may be of interest for a lot of you, the correlation coefficients are 0.83 and 0.28 for the first and second plots, respectively

  2. I’m guessing IMF’s GDP data is an estimate, since 2024 isn’t over yer.

    With the corrected title, the graph really does show GDP per capita vs medals per capita because the per capita cancel out

  3. Recommenting from previous post

    [A correction for medal per capita would be great because:]
    Let’s compare Switzerland (8.8 million people), and the US (330 million).
    Does US have more medals? Definitely, from this figure I estimate about 50 for Switzerland, and about 700 for the US.
    But considering that the US has about 37x more inhabitatns, Switzerland is more effective per capita

    Using purchasing power parity would be even better than GDP per capita

  4. You should also look at correlation between number of medals and total population

    What your chart shows is a weaker correlation with GDP per capita and stronger correlation with GDP – this suggests an even stronger correlation with total population since GDP = GDP per capita x population

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