What happens to the Olympic medal count if we rank per capita?

What happens to the Olympic medal count if we rank per capita?

There’s been a lot of talk about which is the most accurate way to count Olympic medals. The IOC has always used gold medals to determine rankings, with everything else being secondary. Meanwhile there’s an alternate school of thought that all medals are worthy of being counted, so it’s about the total a country earns that’s important.

We count medals to determine the greatest sporting country in the world. What if instead of weighting golds, or evaluating total medals, we determined standings based on how many medals a country wins per-capita? This would mean that we could determine how many medals a nation wins per number of citizens, and can show the prowess of a nation against the rest of the world in a more accurate way.

So, without further ado, here’s how the 2024 Paris games would look if we weighted medal count by citizens. To ensure this doesn’t get too silly if there’s one outlier athlete from a tiny nation we’re going to cap the minimum total medals at 10 to qualify. This means we can still get a deeper look at the rankings, without it being too heavily biased towards the other way.

2024 Olympics per capita medal count

Rank Country Gold Silver Bronze Total Population Citzens per medal
Rank Country Gold Silver Bronze Total Population Citzens per medal
1 New Zealand 4 6 2 12 5,124,000 427,000
2 Australia 18 14 11 43 26,000,000 604,651
3 Netherlands 10 5 6 21 17,700,000 842,857
4 France 13 17 21 51 67,970,000 1,332,745
5 Great Britain 12 17 20 49 66,970,000 1,366,734
6 South Korea 2 8 7 27 51,630,000 1,912,222
7 Canada 6 4 9 19 38,930,000 2,048,947
8 Italy 9 10 7 26 58,940,000 2,266,923
9 USA 27 35 33 95 333,333,300 3,508,771
10 Spain 2 3 8 13 47,780,000 3,675,384
11 Japan 12 7 13 32 125,100,000 3,909,375
12 Germany 9 6 5 20 83,800,000 4,190,000
13 Brazil 2 5 7 14 215,300,000 15,378,571
14 China 26 24 17 67 1,412,000,000 21,074,627

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