Let's Hear It For Norway!

By

George Hickerson

February 25, 2002

The 2002 Winter Olympics are over, the excitement is dying, and life is getting back to normal. And as each nation pats itself on its collective back or grumbles about the unfairness of any contest decided by subjective judgment, I decided to look once more at the final results. Being an American, I am very proud of the achievements of our individual athletes. I was thrilled by the women?s bobsled race, disappointed in the men's speed skating race, and disappointed that Michelle Kwan did not win Gold. But being a citizen of the world, I was equally proud of the achievements of those who were not Americans. Basking in all this global pride, I began to wonder, which country really did do the best in the Olympics?

I checked the Internet, and found one of the many sites which showed the number of awards won by each country (Table 1). There, at the top of the list, was Germany, with 35 awards, followed in second place by the United States, with 34 awards. Hmmm. Jingoism was getting a bit of a nose-thumbing here, so I looked at the number of Gold, Silver, and Bronze awards won by each country. Gee willickers, this was no better! There was Germany once more, with two more gold medals than we had and three more silver medals.

Table 1 Medal Rankings by Total Number Awarded

I consoled myself with the realization that this was the highest medal total we had ever achieved, and much higher than what many of our experts predicted we would win. But you know, that didn't really cut it for me. I had heard too much about faster ice and better equipment, and who has most likely access to such technological discoveries? I don't think Canada's Eskimos even have a word for this type of ice. Then I had noticed Belarus, on the bottom of the medal list. I knew that Belarus was someplace on the other side of the globe, probably a small tiny country. I looked it up in The World Almanac and Book of Facts for 2002, and there it was. It only had ten million people and was one of those countries that gained independence when the former Soviet Union br oke up. Well, no wonder it only had one medal!

Then it hit me.

If a small country had a limited chance to have a large number of medals, then it stood to reason that a large country should have a large number of medals. So I did something that I haven?t seen done on any of the Winter Olympic web pages. I started to compare the number of awards won by each nation with the size of its population. My reasoning was simple. A larger country probably had more potential athletes to compete in each event and in more events than a smaller country had. So thinking, I now looked at the distribution of medals based on the number of people in each country (Table 2).

Table 2 Medal Rankings by Number Awarded per 000s of People

The results were hardly surprising. There was Norway, sitting at the top of the list, with one medal for every 188,000 people. Other countries that I normally felt safe in ignoring were way ahead of the United States. Of course, Germany still was ahead of us in the rankings. We would have to win more than 117 medals to beat the Germans. We could try splitting Germany up. I suspect we would have to split it up into more than two parts this time.

I am sure there are many Norwegians who know that they actually out-performed the United States and Germany. I don?t know that many Estonians are aware of how well they actually did. But if we started ranking Olympic medals on the basis of the potential opportunity to win a medal, perhaps the world competition would become more worldly and less a showcase for one or two countries.

Of course, Belarus will have to do better. They are still pretty far down on the list.