What happens to the Olympic medal count if we rank per capita?

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There’s been a lot of talk about which is the most accurate way to count Olympic medals. The IOC has always used gold medals to determine rankings, with everything else being secondary. Meanwhile there’s an alternate school of thought that all medals are worthy of being counted, so it’s about the total a country earns that’s important.

We count medals to determine the greatest sporting country in the world. What if instead of weighting golds, or evaluating total medals, we determined standings based on how many medals a country wins per-capita? This would mean that we could determine how many medals a nation wins per number of citizens, and can show the prowess of a nation against the rest of the world in a more accurate way.

So, without further ado, here’s how the 2024 Paris games would look if we weighted medal count by citizens. To ensure this doesn’t get too silly if there’s one outlier athlete from a tiny nation we’re going to cap the minimum total medals at 10 to qualify. This means we can still get a deeper look at the rankings, without it being too heavily biased towards the other way.

2024 Olympics per capita medal count

Rank Country Gold Silver Bronze Total Population Citzens per medal
Rank Country Gold Silver Bronze Total Population Citzens per medal
1 New Zealand 6 6 2 14 5,124,000 366,000
2 Australia 18 14 14 46 26,000,000 565,217
3 Hungary 4 5 5 14 9,643,000 688,786
4 Netherlands 11 6 8 25 17,700,000 708,000
5 France 14 19 22 55 67,970,000 1,235,818
6 Great Britain 14 17 21 52 66,970,000 1,287,885
7 Canada 6 5 11 22 38,930,000 1,769,545
8 South Korea 13 8 7 28 51,630,000 1,843,928
9 Italy 10 11 9 30 58,940,000 1,964,667
10 USA 30 38 35 103 333,333,300 3,236,246
11 Germany 10 9 6 25 83,800,000 3,352,000
12 Ukraine 3 4 4 11 38,000,000 3,454,545
13 Spain 2 3 8 13 47,780,000 3,675,385
14 Japan 13 8 13 34 125,100,000 3,679,412
15 Brazil 2 6 8 16 215,300,000 13,456,250
16 China 30 25 19 74 1,412,000,000 19,081,081





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