We've all seen the medal table, and there have been various complaints that it's not fair, especially to smaller countries, to order it by total number of medals. Even as an American, I agree with this. So, what's the best way to normalize this data? Some have said it should be by the country's population. But there is no good correlation between population and number of athletes sent, plus not all countries enter all events. Others have said to normalize it by number of athletes. But that's far from accurate, since a single athlete could enter many events (especially swimming and track), while you have an entire team in sports like football that counts for just one medal.
The best way that I could come up with to normalize the data was by number of entries into events. This shows to me the chances each country had of getting a medal. For the raw data, I used https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2024_Summer_Olympics_medal_table, and the individual country pages linked to that one, so there may be some errors. (It was a pain collecting all the data!)
So here's my top ten, ordered by gold (like the medal table usually is):
Congrats to Dominica! They sent only 4 athletes, but still managed to come home with a gold.
But what about just getting to the podium?
Saint Lucia managed to hit the podium an impressive 40% of the times they entered events!
Here's my full list of countries, ordered by gold, then silver & bronze. I only included those that won medals.
And for the raw data if you want to error check me (and get an eye chart too!), here's that:
So, what do you think?
Posted by bjo23
3 comments
After Tokyo, I did a similar thing [normalizing by number of events per sport](https://crayshack.com/2021/08/14/adjusting-medal-totals-for-number-of-events/). Different analysis, but similar kind of approach.
Very cool. I’m impressed that over a quarter of the USA entrants got medals, especially since they were often competing against each other in the same event.
Brilliant work Op. I live for these types of Stats.