It seems the US always wins the most gold medals and most overall medals. I don’t really believe Americans are generally physically superior to others, so why does it win so many gold medals?
The US has a huge pool of available athletes to select from.
The US has a huge pool of sport complexes/institutions to develop top tier athletes.
The US has the money to spend on achieving high results.
During the walk of nations, I think we have like 500+ competing athletes. Compared to lots of countries with like 2…
You need to have a certain amount of wealth to be able to support your kid until they make the Olympic team. For many people in many countries that’s simply not an option. I’ve also heard that the genetic diversity in the US is fairly unique and helps create competitive candidates.
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Precisely. I was watching men’s water polo, and Montenegro pretty much dominates. The commentators said water polo is (practically) the national sport. They mentioned the population, and double checking wiki, I find the population of the entire country is between 600,000 and 700,000 people. Demographics of Montenegro - Wikipedia
Contrast that with the United States, and you have your answer. (Even compared to China or Russia, the other points above stand.)
One factor is population 300+million vs 4-80million.
Let’s say, if the EU would compete as a single country, instead of every single member state by itself, the US would not dominate.
Even using the term dominate is a stretch.
In the 2012 games the US got 103 medals, China 88, Russia 79 and little Great Britain got 65 (that’s approximately 1 for every million Brit), Germany got 44.
Putting Germany and Britain together is half the US populous, yet it’s just a little more medals.
From the London 2012 Olympics
Wiki
Cite 1
Cite 2
The US doesn’t even top at the Winter Olympics against single Countries - Cite
Countries like India don’t have a support system for Olympic sports or the will to and/or the same interests as the score leading countries.
This is incorrect because a combined Euro team would have far fewer athletes competing.
I liked these charts from the NY Times which show how different countries have dominated different Olympic sports over time…
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That’s one of the reasons these comparisons never really work; you can find a thousand conflating factors, and compare medals results a hundred different ways. And in fairness, you have to include the Winter Games, too.
The USA wins a lot of medals because it’s a very populous country that has the money, resources and motivation to train elite athletes in many different sports. There’s no other answer.
I think sexism is probably a factor too. The US completely dominates women’s soccer (the result today excepted). Does that mean the US has the best soccer culture, coaches, etc? Not remotely, it’s just that it’s totally fine for women to play sports here and a lot of resources are spent on it. Nobody in Brazil cares at all about women’s soccer.
I don’t know if that would really matter- even if rather than having 3 per country in each event, it condensed down to 3, the assumption is that the top 3 will qualify and win the medals just like before. The proceedings would just be sped up because there would be a lot fewer competitors total.
Still, there has to be a certain level of wealth and/or interest in youth sports before you’re really going to get a serious Olympic team going, plus you have to have some critical mass in terms of population as well.
I mean, what’s the rate of people who are seriously interested in competitive air rifle shooting? Pretty low, I’m guessing. So in a rich, populous nation there will not only be a reasonable number who are interested, there will also be a reasonable number who can afford to participate. And as the numbers grow, the chances of getting someone really good out of that latter population grows.
So if we say that 1 person in 250,000 each year is interested in air rifle shooting, the US is going to have 1200 or so who are interested. Let’s say that 75% of interested people can afford it- that gives us 800. And let’s say that 1 in 500 is really good- that gives the US a chance to have 1 really good person, possibly 2. So we’ll conceivably have a team of 4 really good people each olympics.
Contrast this with a country like Australia with a population of 24 million. They’d likely have about 96 people who are interested, 72 who can participate, and probably one really good person every 7 years. So they’ll end up with a serious competitor every other olympics.
If you look at somewhere like Cameroon, you probably have fewer people interested (or even aware of it) and fewer who can participate, even though Australia and Cameroon are roughly comparable in terms of population.
Except it doesn’t appear as though most sports allow three to compete in the same division. At least, as near as I can tell. Many sports appear to have rules in place that specifically prevent one nation from sweeping the podium.
“I have an army.”
“We have a Phelps.”
Also the US gives a lot of top athletes free training in high school and college. That does not happen as much in other countries ,especially for women.
And in the US we have achieved full equality of the sexes, with respect to soccer, anyway: Nobody cares at all about men OR women’s soccer…
It is expensive to produce an elite athlete. Each one is backed by tens of thousands of dollars of support annually. Their families give up everything else just to support that one kid’s career. That requires a certain level of wealth in the first place.
Average Americans, no. But there are a lot of us, so the chance that one of the genetically freakish super-athlete who wins gold will be born here is higher than for a smaller country with fewer people.
As well as the other reasons cited. The refugee Olympic team hasn’t medalled so far. Are they inferior? No, it is just hard to make it to swim practice with people shooting all around you.
Regards,
Shodan
USA wins a lot of medals because it does well in sports where they give out a lot of medals. There are 32 gold medals in swimming (well, 33, if you allow for one tie, and there have been times when two USA swimmers tied for the gold in an event, and it was counted as two USA golds), and somewhere around 45 in track & field.
Also, coincidentally or not, a lot of recently added sports are in sports that are popular in the USA; for example, BMX cycling, and, in the Winter Olympics, snowboarding.