Canada's Olympic Secret

The athletes have competed, the tears have been wept, and the anthems have been played. The medals are now being shown to friends and neighbours, while the athletes recover and ponder Beijing in 2008.

As usual, the USA came top of the medals chart, with an incredible 103 medals. In Sydney, they won 97. In Atlanta, they won 101. It was an impressive performance, and the American Olympic team deserves to celebrate its success.

Here in Canada, on the other hand, wailing journalists and woe-filled Olympic organizers are down in the dumps, moaning how badly we did. "Send more money!" they exclaim. "Reorganize the system! Our athletes are starving!"

It this just the normal Canadian breast-beating, or did our athletes really perform so badly? We won 12 medals, compared to 14 in Sydney, and 22 in Atlanta. So no, we didn't match the tally from the last two Olympics, but America has nine times more people than Canada, and if you multiply Canada's medal tally by 9, it comes to 108. On a per population basis, our athletes outperformed the Americans, and we should be celebrating with every bit as much pride as they are, rather than inflicting a heavy sense of failure on our brilliant Canadian team.

Bahamas beats China

By what kind of logic do we compare the achievements of a huge nation such as China (63 medals, one for every 20 million people) with the Bahamas (two medals, one for every 150,000 people)? When you take into account the size of their countries, you could argue the Bahaman athletes won 133 more medals per million people than the Chinese did.

When you take population into account, and rank the athletic achievement of the nations by how many medals they won for every million people, a very different medals table emerges.

On this score, these are the winning nations from the Athens games:

GOLD: Bahamas (1 medal per 0.15 million people)
SILVER: Australia (1 medal per 0.41 million people)
BRONZE: Cuba (1 medal per 0.42 million people)

They are followed by Estonia, Slovenia, Jamaica, Latvia and Hungary. The traditional big winners come in much lower. Out of the 75 medal-winning nations, Russia was 26th(1 per 1.56 million), the USA 40th (1 per 2.85 million) , and China 70th (1 per 20.6 million). Canada came in 38th (1 per 2.71 million), right in the middle of the pack.

It is fascinating to see how consistent the results are, compared to four years ago. In Sydney, the Bahamas came in 1st, Australia was 4th, and Cuba 6th. Russia was 30th, USA 46th, and China 75th. Canada came in 41st, ahead of the USA.

But is population alone a good measure of national athletic performance? What about the amount of money a nation can devote to its athletes? Lacking the statistics for the athletics and sponsorship budgets of each nation, the next best measure we can use is Gross Domestic Product (GDP), as a measure of the available wealth that can be used to sponsor and support athletes, giving them the time, equipment and freedom they need to train.

Money doesn't matter

If Canada's sports experts are right, and more money will deliver more medals, shouldn't we expect the American team, which can draw on more financial resources than any other nation, to come top of the table? On the straight medal count, they did. But when you rank the nations by "Medals per GDP," the American team comes in a shocking 68th out of 75 nations.

On this second score, these are the winning nations from the Athens games:

GOLD: Cuba ($1.17 bn GDP per medal)
SILVER: Jamaica ($2.04 bn GDP per medal)
BRONZE: Bahamas ($2.55 bn GDP per medal)

They are followed by Georgia, Eritrea, Belarus and North Korea. Russia was 29th ($14 bn per medal), China 66th ($102 bn per medal), and the USA 68th ($106 bn per medal). Canada was 63rd ($80 bn per medal). Clearly, money is not the answer. If money was the secret to athletic success, the USA would be in the top eight nations, not the bottom eight.

So what is the secret of athletic success? First, it helps to be a small nation. On a proportional basis, whether for population or GDP, the smaller nations have more success than big ones. Do the athletes of smaller nations generate a bigger cheer factor, or take more pride in their sport than the athletes of bigger nations, where power and distance may take the edge off national joy? If this is so, no amount of money will make any difference. Whatever your conclusion, it's all food for thought.

Guy Dauncey is an author, speaker, and part-time 10k runner. He lives in Victoria, B.C. For Dauncey's Other Olympic Medals Chart for the last three Summer Olympics, see www.earthfuture.com/olympics.