We Suck at Winter Sport
I was comparing Olympic medal counts today. Of course, we all know that the US has the most, followed by Germany, then Norway.
Feeling all proud about that, fellow Americans? Don't be. Adjust it for population first.
I grabbed the medal counts from the official site on Wednesday afternoon. They may have, of course, changed by then.
If you just look at the medal counts for the top ten countries, the good old USA looks pretty good. But if you take the population of each country and divide it by the medal counts, you get, basically the number of people in each country per medal. Which is a much truer look at how well countries are doing. And if we do that with the top ten, how do things look? Like this:
Wow! The USA gets its ass handed to it, doesn't it? Dead last out of the top ten. I'm guessing that if I included even more smaller countries, we would continue to plummet quite a ways.
The right-most column tells the real story. It's the ratio of how many more people each country needs to win each medal, compared to Norway.
Even second place Austria needs nearly three times as many folks than Norway for each medal it wins.
But look at the USA. We need over 40 times the people than Norway does for each of our medals. We need 11,874,808 people for each medal! That's nearly two and half Norways alone.
Man, we suck at this! And Norway fucking rocks!
Here's the same info as a graph, for the visually-oriented:
And all this doesn't even take into account the Norwegian Curling team's pants.
