Interesting figure, but I think a linear regression (% medals vs % GDP) doesn’t make sense here.
There’s a reason most of the “underperforming” countries have significantly larger populations that “overperforming” countries.
At something like the olympics, being part of a large country is a pretty big disadvantage, as often times the competition to *make* the olympic team in your country is just as hard as the olympics themselves.
For example in diving.
China swept gold and usually got a 2nd medal, and with different divers. It is highly likely that if china was able to bring 6+ competitors to each event instead of only being able to compete with 2, that they would sweep 3 medals nearly every event.
This assumes that a country’s advantage in winning medals scales perfectly with population, but it really doesn’t seem like that would be the case. Once the talent pool reaches a certain size you’d think there would be diminishing returns considering there are only so many athletes who can compete and so many medals you can win.
This is confusing to read. The *most* underperforming country is not at the top of each graph, but the *most* overperforming is?
I would have just swapped the sorting for the underperforming graphs. Would have made far more sense at a glance.
This has to be one of the most useless comparisons I have seen.
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Full post [here](https://mindripple.substack.com/p/who-actually-did-well-at-the-paris).
Interesting figure, but I think a linear regression (% medals vs % GDP) doesn’t make sense here.
There’s a reason most of the “underperforming” countries have significantly larger populations that “overperforming” countries.
At something like the olympics, being part of a large country is a pretty big disadvantage, as often times the competition to *make* the olympic team in your country is just as hard as the olympics themselves.
For example in diving.
China swept gold and usually got a 2nd medal, and with different divers. It is highly likely that if china was able to bring 6+ competitors to each event instead of only being able to compete with 2, that they would sweep 3 medals nearly every event.
This assumes that a country’s advantage in winning medals scales perfectly with population, but it really doesn’t seem like that would be the case. Once the talent pool reaches a certain size you’d think there would be diminishing returns considering there are only so many athletes who can compete and so many medals you can win.
This is confusing to read. The *most* underperforming country is not at the top of each graph, but the *most* overperforming is?
I would have just swapped the sorting for the underperforming graphs. Would have made far more sense at a glance.
This has to be one of the most useless comparisons I have seen.