What country will win the Olympics?
And what events are most important?
What’s the best way to keep track of which country is winning the Olympics? Total gold medals? Total medals of all types? Weighted medals of all types? But what weighting scheme? (3 points for gold, 2 for silver, 1 for bronze? How about 5 for gold, 2 for silver, 1 for bronze?)
What about per capita? Shouldn’t China and the USA be expected to win a lot of medals?
But a problem with per capita is flukish results in tiny countries. For example, in Tokyo in 2021, San Marino, a hilltop city-state enclave of 34,000 within Italy, won a silver medal in shooting, a bronze medal in shooting, and a bronze in wrestling. That’s impressive!
On the other hand, now and then, tiny countries in Europe or the Caribbean are going to get lucky and win some medals and shoot to the top of the per capita charts.
So, in the Journal of Sports Analytics, two researchers with some time on their hands propose a compromise that ranks countries by how much better than expected their results are:
Population-adjusted national rankings in the Olympics
Article type: Research Article
Authors: Duncan, Robert C.a | Parece, Andrewb
Affiliations: [a] Department of Astronomy, University of Texas, Austin, Texas, USA | [b] Charles River Associates, Boston, Massachusetts, USA
Keywords: Olympics, ranking system, medal counts, medals per capita, national ranks
DOI: 10.3233/JSA-240874
Journal: Journal of Sports Analytics, vol. 10, no. 1, pp. 87-104, 2024
Published: 12 July 2024
Abstract
Ranking countries in the Olympic Games by medal counts clearly favors large-population countries over small ones, while ranking by medals-per-capita produces national rankings with very small population countries on top. We discuss why this happens, and propose a new national ranking system for the Olympics, also based upon medals won, which is inclusive in the sense that countries of widely-varying population can achieve high rankings. This population-adjusted probability ranking ranks countries by how much evidence they show for high capability at Olympic sports. In particular, it ranks countries according to how improbable their medal counts would be in an idealized reference model of the Games which posits that all medal-winning nations have equal propensity per capita for winning medals. The ranking index U is defined using a simple binomial sum. Here we explain the method, and we present population-adjusted national rankings for the last three summer Olympics (London 2012, Rio 2016 and Tokyo 2020, held in 2021). If the advantages of this ranking method come to be understood by sports media covering the Olympics and by the interested public, it could be widely reported alongside raw medal counts, thus adding excitement and interest to the Olympics.
You can read their proposed methodology there, and here are their rankings:
Note that Russia the Country wasn’t officially allowed in the 2021 Olympics for juicing at their 2014 Winter Olympics in Sochi. (I assumed there was an unwritten rule that host countries get to push the pedal to the metal on PEDs, like Spain in Barcelona or Australia in Sydney, as a reward for wasting all that money). But Russian athletes were allowed to compete. They would have finished fifth in 2021.
Britain got fired up over various Olympic sports for the 2012 London Olympics and has been winning a lot of medals ever since. Australia has been doing well in the Olympics for a long time and is scheduled to bring the 2032 Olympics to Brisbane.
But that also raises the question of whether each medal should be weighted equally. Jamaica, which wins glamorous sprints, seems like it does even better than its top ten rankings. Kenya and Ethiopia have increasingly huge populations, but they do win important medals.
I’d rank events roughly in this order:
Men’s Marathon. It’s been the symbolic big one since the Greek shepherd won at Athens in 1896. 2500 years of tradition.
Women’s Gymnastics All-Around (decides the World’s Greatest Pixie like its Winter Olympics figure skating counterpart picks the World’s Greatest Princess)
Men’s 100 meter dash: closest thing in the Olympics to a heavyweight championship fight.
Men’s basketball — unlike with soccer, the Olympics are the pinnacle of international basketball competition. Unfortunately, US domination keeps basketball from being all that exciting.
The decathlon used to be a very big deal, but as track and field has faded, it now seems too technical for casual Olympic fans to follow.
What’s the single top swimming event? Relays? The 50 meter? The individual medley? The butterfly?
What else? What do you rank near the top?
Sorry but once they let in the NBA players in they ruined basketball. Could they maybe limit it to players who went pro since last Olympics? No reason 35 year old pros should be representing USA in basketball.
The Summer games have so many events and many of the events are either obscure, such as kayaking and air rifle, or redundant, such as soccer, golf & tennis. So what are the premier Summer Olympics events? I'd say women's gymnastics and the 100 meters race. The swimming events most definitely matter to the countries with dominant swimmers. But most countries don't have one.
I agree with Steve that basketball could be the premier international competition except for the US being so dominant.
I find the Winter Olympics to be a superior international competition. For one, there is a consistent theme of contests involving ice or snow. The organizers keep coming up with variations on this theme but one way or another it is a contest of sliding on a slick surface.
The Summer games are a cacophony of land, air & water contests. This allows just about every country to have a sport, but the overall event is so vast and discombobulated I find it impossible to keep track. On one hand, there is the surprise of flipping the channel to see what strange event is showing. On the other hand, the obscurity of many of these events makes it a challenge to figure out the nature of the contest - I'm still trying to understand handball and the foul system in water polo.