Why Are Some Countries Good and Some Bad at the Olympics?

by Tom Kando

No matter how much this is denied, most people probably link Olympic success with some sort of national, moral superiority. Medals equal national pride. Well, this is precisely the idea  which I will NOT touch with a ten-foot poll in the present article. What I DO want to do is offer some OTHER explanations, or at least correlates, of Olympic success and failure. This is pop sociology, speculation meant to draw your interest.

This year, once again, the usual countries dominated the medal count. Since the collapse of the Soviet Union, the US has usually been dominant, with China rising as somewhat of a competitor in recent years. During the Cold War, the Soviets and their vassals (particularly East Germany) were in the forefront of the medal count, thanks to massive cheating.

At first, a country’s most obvious advantage seems to be a large population: The top eight countries in the overall medal count - the US, the UK, China, Russia, Germany, France, Japan and Italy - are all among the world’s twenty most populous nations. However, such rankings are unfair, as they do not take population size into account. Is China, with nearly a billion and a half people, not entitled to more medals than Grenada, with a population of 100,000? (There are fourteen thousand times as many Chinese as Grenadians!).

A fairer measure is a PER CAPITA  ranking.  So I added up every country’s total score by giving 3 points for every gold medal, 2 for every silver and 1 for every bronze. I then ranked the countries' per capita scores.

And lo and behold, the ranking almost totally reverses itself. Look at the table:

Countries Ranked by number of Medals in Proportion to Population
Rank	Country	Number of people it takes to earn at least one bronze medal
1	Grenada	53,000
2	Bahamas	94,250
3	Jamaica	104,423
4	New Zealand	135,114
5	Croatia	183,043
6	Denmark	226,760
7	Slovenia	257,875
8	Bahrein	266,400
9	Hungary	289,853
10	Fiji	297,333
11	Armenia	330,000
14	Netherlands	402,976
15	Australia	428,018
17	Great Britain	449,417
21	Switzerland	553,267
27	France	804,938
29	Germany	938,244
30	Belgium	941,583
32	Italy	1.068 million
33	Qatar	1.085 million
34	Canada	1.089 million
38	Russia	1.281 million
39	USA	1.287 million
45	Kenya	1.485 million
46	Japan	1.734 million
61	Israel	4.032 million
66	Brazil	5.390 million
73	Ethiopia	8.283 million
77	China	9.829 million
80	Mexico	15.288 million
82	Egypt	30.503 million
84	Indonesia	36.795 million
85	Philippines	50.350 million
86	Nigeria	173.600 million
87	India	417.333 million
88-207	119 countries	zero medals

If you count medals on a per capita basis, small countries earn far more of them than large countries: The top ten are Grenada, the Bahamas, Jamaica, New Zealand, Croatia, Denmark, Slovenia, Bahrain, Hungary and Fiji. This demolishes the common-sense assumption that countries with large populations are more successful at the Olympics.

When we  take population into account, we see that the most successful at the Olympics are the small island nations, the two countries “Down Under” and the small Eastern European countries.

The relationship between Olympic success and population size is actually INVERSE. On a per capita basis, the United States ranks 39^th, just behind Russia at 38^th. “Powerhouse” China is 77^th! India, with one sixth of the world’s population, is dead last at 87^th. So, Ceteris paribus (other things being equal), a country’s population size is NOT an advantage.

So, why do many large countries nevertheless collect sizable numbers of medals?

As I said earlier, many people are tempted to equate a country’s Olympic prowess with moral superiority. Of course, this is absurd. The former German Democratic Republic was a perennial Olympic powerhouse and also one of the world’s most horrendous societies. India’s Olympic performance is pathetic, yet its culture and its many achievements are second to none.

Money: Obviously, RESOURCES are essential. Rich countries that can afford well-funded national sports organizations can be expected to excel. The US and Western Europe are cases in point. Then, too, many countries’ governments subsidize their sports and their Olympic programs for nationalistic purposes. Hitler set this trend in motion in preparation for the Munich Olympics in 1936. This is what the Soviet block did throughout the Cold War, and what Russia and Communist countries such as China and North Korea still do today. To such countries, sports and the Olympic games are tools of propaganda to maximize national prestige. Cheating is often used as an enhancement.

Culture: In addition, many countries such as Hungary, Kazakhstan and the Baltic States have hung on to a tradition of athletic excellence, a national focus on “physical culture.” Countries seem to value sports in and of itself. Nowhere is the importance of CULTURE more evident than “down under:” I have personally experienced the enormous focus on sports, athletic competition and physical culture in Australia and New Zealand.

Remember that the Olympic movement is a WESTERN phenomenon. It began in ancient Greece in 776 BC, and was resurrected in 1894 by the French Baron Pierre de Coubertin. The events featured at the Olympics are largely Western sports. The more westernized a society is, the more successful it is likely to be at the Olympics. The absence of India and of most Muslim countries from among the ranks of successful Olympic participants does not indicate any inferiority on their part, but the fact that young people in those cultures have different hobbies, games, pastimes and sports than we do in the West. It is no coincidence that Japan, South Korea and to a lesser extent Malaysia and Taipei have achieved Olympic success: They are by far the most westernized Asian societies. Today, China is westernizing at breakneck speed, with similar Olympic results.

Conclusion: I personally find “physical culture” (as the French refer to the entire fitness movement) an extremely positive thing. Apart from when it is pushed to Spartan extremism, it is an essential element of modern societies’ public health and quality of life. The ancients knew it, calling it mens sana in corpore sano - a healthy mind in a healthy body. The modern Olympic movement revived this ancient ideal. It also aimed to replicate the Greeks’ genius by offering the games as a substitute for war in international competition.

Sports and athletic competition are positive values. So is fandom, by and large. Olympic success is strongly correlated to a country’s quality of life and the quality of its public health. Olympic success is an indication that a country enjoys good quality of life and good public health because its culture values physical culture. The absence of Olympic success on the part of India, Indonesia, Vietnam, many other Asian countries and much of the Muslim world is not only due to poverty (and currently, war), but also to the fact that such countries are less far along the process of modernization and the adoption of Western-style physical culture.

Africa’s and Latin America’s poor  Olympic performances  reflects something  different: These are the two poorest  continents of the world, and clearly they lack the resources for generous funding of sports programs. In addition,  many countries on both continents are  politically unstable and dysfunctional.

In sum, while money is important, so is culture. At first, a society has a culture. This culture results in a political system that is either functional or dysfunctional, and that system in turn produces an economy which provides the population with an adequate standard of living and distribution of wealth - or NOT. It must be the goal of any society to provide the population with good quality of life. I firmly believe that a proper level of physical culture is an important ingredient and contributor to quality of life. The pursuit of Olympic success is a positive value, as long as it is not part of a nationalistic and chauvinistic propaganda campaign. leave comment here

© Tom Kando 2016