If you saw the opening ceremonies of the Olympics, you know that some countries sent an army of athletes while others only sent a handful. That makes the medal count a bit misleading. Which country would have the highest M.P.A. (medals per athlete) score?
I’m sorry, but I don’t know.
I do think though that a better measure of ‘Olympic ability’ is medals per population.
This map here shows the numbers of medals won, per million inhabitants.
Bahamas, Cuba and Australia are the top trio.
How is determined the number of athletes a given country can send to the games, anyway?
I don’t think there’s any determination - it’s just a question of how many athletes from a given country compete in the Olympic events, and how many qualify for the actual games.
Divided by per capita GDP, of course.
Panama has 7 athletes and a gold medal.
Togo has 6 athletes and a bronze.
There may be better ratios, but I got bored of manually cross-referencing them.
True. There are also some “freebies”. Like in track and field, if your country has zero qualifying athletes, you can put in one male and one female for one event each, and they don’t have to meet the proper standard, just be somewhat competitive. Usually they end up in something like the 100m dash which has 10 qualifying heats.
http://www.nbcolympics.com/trackandfield/resultsandschedules/rsc=ATM001900/index.html
I initially thought Zimbabwe must be a good candidate. They sent 13 athletes and Kirsty Conventry has single handedly won 4 medals (3 silver and 1 gold). That’s about 0.3 medals per athlete.
I’ve just looked through the medal tables and see a few of the smaller countries have won some medals as well. It’s a bit difficult out work out as I can’t find a full list of the teams - maybe someone with more time on their hands can try.
That map starts in 1996. If it would go back a litle earlier, to 1976, we’d see that Liechtenstein with a population of about 35,000, got 6 Olympic medals that year(all in the Winter Olympics, and all of them from the Wenzel siblings), That puts the medals per million ratio at a whopping 171.
That blows the Bahamas completely away.
That was an unusual year for Liechtenstein, admittedly. But it shows what an impact one talented athlete can have in a small country.
Ed
Well, then I’m going to reformulate my question : how do they qualify? I assume a country can’t send, say, 1247 archers and 842 judokas to Beijing, hoping that at least some of them will qualify for the finals?
Well. The athletes have to meet set standards (swim, run below a specific time) and/or qualify for the games in a qualifier (handball, football). And usually you don’t have, for example, 1247 archers that are good enough to meet the qualifying standard.
Also, the nations themselves, can set higher standards if they want better athletes to go to the games.
But if none of your athletes meet this standard, you can always send a competitor to each event, like **SmackFu[/] said.
That’s clearer, now. Thanks.
And each nation can only send a maximum of 3 athletes to any one event, no matter how many have achieved the qualifying standard.
Hence the US trials where the only first 3 qualify.
Ok, I didn’t know about the 3 maximum. Interesting.
How many people did North Korea send? They have a gold.
If Michael Phelps was a country, right now he’d be in 9th place for “number of gold medals”. He’s just behind Germany, Australia, South Korea, and Japan, and just in front of Italy, the Netherlands, Jamaica, and the Ukraine. I just thought that was kinda funny.
You mean he isn’t a country? Well, that will give him something to win in 4 years.