The real Olympic medal tally

When you slice and dice the final Olympic medal tally to account for country population and wealth, how do Australia’s 46 medals stack up? A triumph or a waste of time? Do we punch above our weight or are we pack of plodders?

The following table shows the official top ten by gold medals in column one, and then in columns two and three, what the top ten looks like when it’s adjusted for population and GDP. (Thanks to Symworld for the numbers. For the complete list, click here)

Olympic medal tables adjusted for population and GDP.

The good news is that in the adjusted figures Australia comfortably beats Great Britain, the US, China and Russia, but in doing so lets New Zealand race past for a higher place on the overall tallies. The above table also shows that the Olympics is anything but a level playing field. The richest and most populous nations have an insurmountable competitive advantage when finally the athletes crouch waiting for the starter’s gun.

When we calculate how many citizens it takes to earn a gold medal, Australia rockets to the top of the standings. It’s beyond doubt: Australia converts citizens into gold medals more efficiently than any other nation in the top ten. And into that list you can add New Zealand, which takes 4,173,460 citizens to produce one gold medal. That makes Australia roughly three times more efficient at converting citizens into gold medals than our cross-Tasman rivals, and more than twice as efficient as the Brits.

Citizens per gold medal — An alternate Olympic Top Ten

What’s really interesting about those numbers is how many medals our rivals would win if they produced as many golds per citizen as Australia does. China, for example, would have won 903 golds. Here’s an alternate top five based on Australia’s ratio of gold medals to citizens. Just imagine our dominance if we could find, say, another billion citizens.