If you become involved in the political process,
you can help to determine the shape of the world you live in,
both locally and globally.
If you don’t, someone else will do it – and
you may not like the result.
ATHENS, 2004
The athletes have competed, the winners have
rejoiced, and the anthems have been played. The big countries
have won lots of medals, and the smaller countries have won
fewer, with their results displayed in the Olympic Medals Chart
for all to see.
But is the Chart really fair? What kind of
justice is it, when the USA, with 293 million people, has 1,000
times more people to choose from than tiny Bahamas, with just
300,000 people?
If we take population into account, and rank
the athletic achievements of the nations by how many medals
they win for every million people, a very different table emerges.
Here are the new "Medals per Population" winning
nations:
- Bahamas
-
Australia
- Cuba
These nations are followed by Estonia, Slovenia,
Jamaica, Latvia and Hungary. The traditional big medal winners
come in lower: Russia is 26th, the USA 40th,
and China 70th.
It is fascinating how consistent the results
are compared to Sydney, when the Bahamas came 1st,
Australia 4th and Cuba 6th. In Sydney,
Russia came in 30th, USA 46th, and China
75th.
But is population alone a good measure of
national athletic performance? What about the amount of money
that a nation can devote to its athletes? I don’t have the
statistics for athletics budgets for each nation, so the next
best is GDP. When we rank the nations by how many billion dollars
of GDP are needed to generate each medal, the results are even
more interesting. (See Table B).
Here are the new "Medals per GDP" winners:
- Cuba
- Jamaica
- Bahamas
They are followed by Georgia, Eritrea, Belarus
and North Korea. Russia comes in 29th, China 66th and
the USA 68th. Clearly, money is not the answer.
If money was the secret to athletic success, the USA, with
close to the world’s highest GDP per person, would surely come
in the top 8 nations, not the bottom 8, as it does. In Cuba,
you need $1.17 billion of GDP to win a medal. In the USA, you
need 100 times more per medal, at $106 billion.
So what is the secret of athletic success,
on the medal podium? First, it helps to be a small nation.
The smaller nations have proportionately much more success
than the big ones. Do the athletes of smaller nations generate
a bigger "cheer factor", and take more pride in their
country than the athletes of the big nations, where the power
and distance of the government takes the edge off national
joy? Who knows? If the athletic achievements of the world’s
nations are to be compared, we should score for the acievements
of every athlete who entered the Games, not just the medal
winners.
- Bahamas 
-
Australia 
- Cuba 
