View: Medals tally with nations?
Olympics reading the US, China, Japan, Australia, France, the Netherlands, Britain, South Korea, Italy and Germany, one is bound to ask: why do some countries fare better than others?
Discussions usually attribute wins and losses to individual abilities, training and dedication. These factors are undoubtedly crucial. But there could be other determinants like economic prosperity. In each of the last three Summer and Winter Olympic Games, the top 10 medal-winning countries have been high-income countries based on World Bank's income-level classifications, with the exception of China (upper-middle income) in Tokyo 2020 Olympics, and OAR (Olympic Athletes from Russia — upper-middle income) in PyeongChang 2018 Winter Olympics.
However, research has found a range of determinants beyond economic prosperity — team size, growth rate, expenditure on health, population, etc — to have a significant impact. We investigated the association between the total medal count for each country at the Beijing 2022 Olympics and their GDP per capita (PPP). A moderate positive relationship is observed with a correlation coefficient of 0.62.
It's important to note that correlation does not imply causation. Economic resources can potentially affect sports prowess. But it's not a sole determining indicator. The correlation between a country's population and its Olympic medal count, for instance, is interesting. Intuitively, the larger the country, one would assume the greater its potential pool of talent and, hence, possibility of a higher
