“If you dream and you allow yourself to dream you can do anything. And that’s what this Olympic medal represents.” – Clara Hughes
So
last week I shared some random Olympic facts…this week it’s all about the medal
rankings at Sochi 2014! Now, last week I told you how much I enjoy the
Olympics, well I also really like numbers and math and statistics! So I decided
to combine these two interests and I made a spreadsheet of the medals won by
all the different countries, and then ranked them based on different criteria.
I thought I’d share some of my findings with you this week.
To
some of you these may just seem like a
bunch of numbers, but hopefully some of you may find them as interesting as I
do!
- Nicole
The
two most common ways to rank countries at the Olympics is by total of number of
medals and by the number of gold medals.
The
top 10 countries by these two systems is as follows:
By
Total Medals By
Gold Medals
1 –
Russia (33) 1
– Russia (13)
2 –
USA (28) 2
– Norway (11)
3 –
Norway (26) 3 – Canada (10)
4 –
Canada (25) 4 –USA (9)
5 –
Netherlands (24) =
5 – Netherlands & Germany (8)
6 –
Germany (19) 7 – Switzerland (6)
7 –
Austria (17) 8
– Belarus (5)
= 8
– France & Sweden (15) = 9 – Austria & France (4)
10
– Switzerland (11)
The
first ranking I do is a points system. Gold gets 3 points, silver gets 2
points, and bronze gets 1 point. This way a country can still get a higher ranking
if they do well but don’t have many gold medals. According to my ‘points
system’ this is what the top medal standings look like:
1 –
Russia (70)
2 –
Canada (55)
= 3
– Norway & USA (53)
5 –
Netherlands (47)
6 –
Germany (41)
7 –
Austria (33)
8 –
France (27)
9 –
Sweden & Switzerland (26)
In
all three of these lists, the countries are pretty much all the same; except in
the gold medal ranking, where Belarus kicks Sweden off the list. Belarus only
had 6 medals in total, and 5 of them were gold, whereas Sweden had 15 medals
with only 2 gold. In all three of these rankings, Russia tops the list. Canada,
Norway and the USA shuffle around in positions 2, 3, and 4. Netherlands is very
consistent, sitting in 5th place on all three lists. Then Germany,
Austria, France and Switzerland take turns in 6, 7, 8, 9, and 10.
Now
for a couple more interesting and unconventional rankings…
Population…one
ranking was the number of medals in proportion to the population of the
country. Here’s the top 10 list of countries with the most medals per capita,
with the number in brackets being the number of medals per million people.
1 –
Norway (5.10)
2 –
Slovenia (3.89)
3 –
Austria (2.02)
4 –
Latvia (1.99)
5 –
Sweden (1.56)
6 –
Netherlands (1.43)
7 –
Switzerland (1.37)
8 –
Finland (0.92)
9 –
Czech Republic (0.76)
10
– Canada (0.71)
Of
all the countries that got at least one medal, China is last in this list, with
only 9 medals for its 1.35 billion people (that’s 0.0067 medals per million
people). The USA was also surprisingly low on this list with only 0.09 medals
per million people. Slovenia, on the other hand, jumps all the way to 2nd
on this list, with 8 medals for its 2.1 million people. Norway blows everyone
else away in this category…with 26 medals for its population of 5.1 million.
Now
this last ranking I find quite interesting, as the country in 1st is
miles ahead of all the other countries. This is the % of athletes with medals.
Well, kind of…technically one athlete may have more than one medal, but I did
this calculation based on the assumption that there is only one medal per
athlete, giving me this ranking:
1 –
Netherlands (58.5%)
2 –
Belarus (25.0%)
3 –
Norway (19.4%)
4 –
France (14.3%)
5 –
Sweden (14.2%)
6 –
China (13.6%)
7 –
Russia (13.2%)
8 –
Austria (13.1%)
9 –
Germany (12.4%)
10
– USA (12.2%)
I
don’t even know what to say about the Netherlands…WOW, they sure know how to pick ‘em! Approximately half their team
got medals, compared that to the 2nd place country where only a
quarter of their team got medals. The Netherlands got 24 medals for the 41
athletes they sent to compete. Second place Belarus also did fairly well, with
their 24 athletes earning a total of 6 medals. Even though China was at the
bottom of the last list, they actually did fairly well according to this
ranking system. Even though they have 1.35 billion people in China, they only
sent 66 athletes to Sochi, making their 9 medals not look so terrible.
Now,
there were three countries that made it to the top 10 in all five of these
ranking systems: Norway, Netherlands and Austria. I think it’s safe to say that
these three countries know how to compete in the Winter Olympics!
I'm sure there’s way more Olympic Medal statistics I could calculate if I had the time…maybe
for the next Olympics I can keep track of things like daily totals, or what sports the medals were in, and maybe even make graphs and pie charts…lucky for
you there won’t be another Olympic Games for a couple of years!
