Comment: Medals won by countries of the “Global North” (HDI 0.800 or more) accounted for 73% of medals at the Paris 2024 Olympics despite representing only 21% of the world population. The medals are also unequally distributed across disciplines, allowing countries of “Global South” to be competitive only in few disciplines, mainly combat sports.
Thank you for putting this together. Even though it’s pretty obvious that this is a problem, it’s nice to have something more concrete that illustrates it so well.
Careful now, people really don’t like to be reminded of their inherent privilege
This is great – where are the development programs for a truly level global competition
so track and wrestling is the “cheapest” sport
Interesting that Basketball and Athletics have high HDI because America won medals, but a lot of the athletes that were involved in winning those medals come from poor backgrounds within America.
A lot of the lime green is China, and they will soon be above .800 anyway, like in 1-2 years.
7 comments
Sources:
– International Olympic Committee, Medal table: [https://olympics.com/en/paris-2024/medals](https://olympics.com/en/paris-2024/medals)
– United Nations, The latest HDI dataset: [https://hdr.undp.org/data-center/human-development-index#/indicies/HDI](https://hdr.undp.org/data-center/human-development-index#/indicies/HDI)
Tool used: Flourish
Comment: Medals won by countries of the “Global North” (HDI 0.800 or more) accounted for 73% of medals at the Paris 2024 Olympics despite representing only 21% of the world population. The medals are also unequally distributed across disciplines, allowing countries of “Global South” to be competitive only in few disciplines, mainly combat sports.
Thank you for putting this together. Even though it’s pretty obvious that this is a problem, it’s nice to have something more concrete that illustrates it so well.
Careful now, people really don’t like to be reminded of their inherent privilege
This is great – where are the development programs for a truly level global competition
so track and wrestling is the “cheapest” sport
Interesting that Basketball and Athletics have high HDI because America won medals, but a lot of the athletes that were involved in winning those medals come from poor backgrounds within America.
A lot of the lime green is China, and they will soon be above .800 anyway, like in 1-2 years.