Olympic medals: two articles

[Will Hopkins]

Last year I got help from people on this list for data on nations' tallies of Olympic medals. Some colleagues (Feifei Li, Pat Lipinska) and I analyzed the data and got a paper accepted last month in Frontiers in Sports and Active Living:  Population, economic and geographic predictors of nations' medal tallies at the Pyeongchang and Tokyo Olympics and Paralympics. We estimated the independent contributions of nations' population size, wealth, geographic latitude, and Muslim proportion on total medal counts and medal counts in the female, male, and mixed events. The rankings of nations after adjustment for these effects were, of course, radically different from the usual rankings based on unadjusted counts and give a better idea of each nation's sport ability.

Feifei Li and I have also published a paper in the same journal with the title Rule Changes to Increase Shared Medal Winning at the Olympics. The sharing of the gold in the men's high jump at the Tokyo Olympics gave us the idea that athletes (or teams) who are effectively equal in ability, based on a close finish, should share the medal. The suggested rule changes in the events we analyzed would result in ~10-15% of medals being shared. Worth it? Put yourself in the place of an athlete who was as good as the medal winner but on the toss of a coin came away with a lower ranked medal or no medal at all.