I saw some stats flying around this morning showing Team GB as having the highest number of gold medals per capita, after Super Saturday when we won 6 gold medals in a single day. I did a little investigation to check the numbers, and am not sure where the numbers came from.

The tweet I saw which seems to have been tweeted a few times by different people, says: Olympic Gold medals per million people – CHN: 0.14 GER: 0.61 USA: 0.66 FRA: 1.07 KOR: 1.23 GBR: 1.33.

Based on my calculations, I worked out the following: CHN: 0.019, GER: 0.061, USA: 0.080, FRA: 0.122, KOR: 0.181, GBR: 0.223, NWZ: 0.681.

New Zealand is by far the highest, because it has such a small population in relation to the others. I also ran some numbers for lifetime gold medals in the summer and combined summer and winter games, but still couldn’t calculate the numbers shown in the first tweet.

Gold medals per capita table

(at 09:30 GMT+1 on 05/08/2012)

Country	Population (millions)	Gold Medals	Gold to Population
New Zealand	4.41	3	0.681
Slovenia	2.05	1	0.487
Jamaica	2.71	1	0.369
Lithuania	3.20	1	0.312
Kazakhstan	16.56	5	0.302
Croatia	4.41	1	0.227
Georgia	4.47	1	0.224
Great Britain (UK)	62.64	14	0.223
Hungary	9.97	2	0.201
South Korea	49.78	9	0.181
Netherlands	16.70	3	0.180
Denmark	5.57	1	0.179
Cuba	11.25	2	0.178
North Korea	24.45	4	0.164
Switzerland	7.91	1	0.126
France	65.44	8	0.122
Belarus	9.47	1	0.106
Czech Republic	10.55	1	0.095
Italy	60.63	5	0.082
United States	311.59	25	0.080
Germany	81.73	5	0.061
South Africa	50.59	3	0.059
Poland	38.22	2	0.052
Romania	21.39	1	0.047
Australia	22.62	1	0.044
Ukraine	45.71	2	0.044
Venezuela	29.28	1	0.034
Canada	34.48	1	0.029
Russia	141.93	3	0.021
China	1,344.13	26	0.019
Japan	127.82	2	0.016
Ethiopia	84.73	1	0.012
Brazil	196.66	1	0.005