How the Aussies topped the medal table (sort of) …
Wit from the Sydney Morning Herald:
How Australia topped the medal tally
Who was the real winner from the London Olympic Games? According to a ground-breaking analysis of the official medal tally by a BusinessDay statistician, the most successful nation at the Olympics was … Australia!
Statistics can be used to tell a lot more than one story, of course. Other nations will try to claim victory using lesser formulations. Based on the number of athletes per medal, for example, China will claim it is the winner. Despite occasional murmurs of complaint at being fleeced out of gold, the Peoples’ Republic needed just 4.5 athletes to win a medal of any colour.
From its team of 396 athletes, the Chinese needed 10 athletes to win each of their gold medals. Next best among the top 25 nations at the Olympics was the US, which needed 12 athletes for each gold and 5.1 athletes for all medals. The American team was by far the biggest with 530 athletes.
The 410-strong Australian squad required 12 athletes for a medal, and 59 athletes for each gold medal. It has been well publicised that the 2012 Olympics were a bit lacking on the gold medal front, at least by Australia’s historical standards. Naturally, the proponents of sports funding are therefore calling on government to dig deep – to buy some more medals at the next Games.
Read the rest here.
Atakohu Middleton is an Auckland journalist with a keen interest in the way the media uses/abuses data. She happens to be married to a statistician. See all posts by Atakohu Middleton »
I know it’s poking fun at the whole business of ranking countries, but I don’t know why this mesure makes any sense.
By multiplying by the number of athletes and dividing by the population aren’t they adjusting the medal count by the percentage of each country’s population that they send to the Olympics. And not in a good way.
Given a number of medals, a country scores better the more of their population they sent to the Olympics. Surely, it should be the other way around.
And is this Brian Dawes a real person? The name is awfully close to Brian Dawe of (John) Clarke and (Brian) Dawe fame:
http://www.abc.net.au/7.30/content/2012/s3559420.htm
12 years ago