Olympic Medal Standings: 5 Ways

“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 5^th 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 2^nd 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 1^st 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 2^nd 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!