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 |