Speaking of grading on the curve: though the IOC is at pains to note that the Olympics is a competition between individuals, not nations, newspapers nevertheless publish the daily ranking of the nations by medal count.

I was thinking today that the medal count is rather misleading since it doesn't take into account the population or wealth of nations. We would EXPECT that the US and China would be at the front of the pack, since we are wealthy and they are populous.

Thus I created my new MB Olympic Ranking, which runs as follows.

1) total up the medals, no weighting for gold vs silver vs bronze (since the difference between the three comes down to essentially random factors of environment, personal condition, judging, etc) Ignore countries with fewer than 5 medals.

2) I got population figures from the UN and calculated a medals per capita index. I got GDP per capita figures from the US govt and calculated medals per GDP per capita index also.

3) I normalized the indexes (or indices, if you prefer) to 1 in each category by dividing through by the lowest index value in the category (thus the "best" score is a 1.0 and they go up from there)

4) I multiplied the two adjusted indexes to create a composite score.

So what we get is a medal ranking weighted by a country's available human & capital resources.

Who's the man now?? All hail BELARUS!!

23 Aug 04