I’ve seen a lot of talk around the place about different ways to rank countries’ performance at the Olympics. Golds per capita, medals per GDP, America’s infamous “bronze is worth the same as gold” system. This article discusses a different, probabilistic model based on expected number of medals if every individual had an equal chance of winning. i.e., it’s based on population, but less blunt than per capita. I haven’t looked at the maths but I suspect it ends up being something like per logarithmic capita.

At one point it talks about how European countries make up most of the top of the ladder. It puts this down to Europe being the birthplace of the modern and ancient Olympics, and says that correcting for that would be “even more controversial than adjusting for economic differences”. My initial reaction was “wait, isn’t European countries’ success basically explained by those economic differences?” And I still think that’s the biggest factor. But I’ve thought of another: the sports involved. There’s a sport literally (sometimes) called “European handball”. Why is there no Kabaddi? Dragon boating? We do have a fair few east Asian martial arts, but why not African or Latin American? The world’s second favourite sport is only getting added at the next Olympics. Admittedly cricket is a European invention too, but it is most popular, especially in the T20 format, in India.

I don’t actually think it would be sensible to “correct” for this bias post-hoc, though expanding the pool of sports going forward would be a good idea.