The Olympic One Percent

When I saw tables for the Rio Olympic Games which ranked countries by medals per person (e.g. www.medalspercapita.com) I wondered how small highly successful countries contribute to global population and how larger countries do relative to the each other on this measure.

In my medal tally countries are ranked by the number of medals per capita. This is the length of each bar below. What I have done differently is show the population as the thickness of each bar. This way one can see what percentage of the global population different countries fit into. The area of each bar (its length multiplied by its thickness) is proportional to the number of medals. The number of medals is also shown in brackets. A few countries, e.g. Grenada, had so many medals per person (one Silver Medal for a population of only 106,000 people), I had to cut the graph in two at 12 medals per million people.

A number of small countries including New Zealand, Jamaica, Denmark and my country of birth, Australia^, fall into the top 1% with 14.4% of all the medals. Britain, France and Canada are part of the first 5% of the population with nearly 40% of the medals. A number of European countries, the United States, Japan and notably Kenya are in the remaining 20% and by now we have covered more than 80% of the medals. Then come the highly populous middle income countries such as the hosts Brazil as well as Iran and China.

I did not post this graph to gloat though. It is sobering. The final 50% of the world has less than 2.1% of the olympic medals. India has just one silver and one bronze despite a population of 1.3 billion. A further 1.46 billion people* from 121 mostly small and disproportionately African nations+ have zero medals to celebrate.

My name is Jan Zika, I am a physicist, oceanographer and general maths nerd who is interested in climate change and other important global questions. I am based at the University of New South Wales. 

I am on twitter (@JanDZika) and you can email me (j.zika@unsw.edu.au).

^ Actually by the time you count Australia's entire population you get to 1.06% of the world's people. Still not bad.

* The remaining population was calculated by subtracting the sum of populations of medal countries from 7.4 billion.

+ The number of non medal countries was calculated by subtracting the number of medal countries from the total number of competing nations (207 according to wikipedia)