Axiom Home Page Forums General Discussion The Water Cooler Olympics, population adjusted medal count

Food for thought:

USA = 32
Germany = 104
Norway = 1,104
Canada = 170
Russia = 39

Those Norwegians must eat their shreddies every morning!

It would be interesting to see the $ spent vs Medal count results. Not that thats relevant, this being an amateur competition and all...

Fred, could you post a link to the source. I’m curious if they are also accounting for non-native born athletes which is also a sore point for me when tallying national medal counts.

Sure. Source = Fred + Google + calc.exe

Somehow I don't think the worlds elite atheletes are flocking to Norway as a country of convenience. Trust me, I've been there in January...

I remember during the opening ceremonies, they stated Liechenstein had nine medals in it's history, and if you compared that to the US and the population difference, they should have something like 79,000 medals... lol

I’ve been to Norway too. Nice ladies but no palm trees so it’s a non-starter for me too.

My angle wasn’t that Norway’s numbers were so high but rather they might be higher if you adjust for athletes moving to countries like the U.S. and maybe Canada and W. Germany.

I’ve always thought national medal counts were sort of stupid when you see an Ethiopian or Kenyan running the marathon for the U.S. or a Nigerian running track for the U.K.

If you represent a country I am sure they count towards that country regardless of your origin.

I dunno, it goes both ways. There was an American swimming for Nigeria in 2008.

There is a Canadian mogulist representing Australia in these games, and an American Ski-crosser representing Canada... Probably many more but that is off the top of my head. We had Jamaican sprinters win gold for us a bunch of times.

Another point is that many athletes are trained in other countries, or trained by coaches from other countries. It's actually good to promote certain sports which would otherwise not get a foothold in some parts of the world although many times it comes down to $$, unfortunately.

So then the politically incorrect version of the Olympics would be race (not country) based?