The medal count, 1896-2008
I couldn’t care less about the national medal count at the Olympics, as I tend to see the Olympics as a big track/swimming/gymnastics/etc. meet while the media treat it as a test of national potency and thus a reaffirmation of American greatness when the U.S. does well or as a sign of American decline when the U.S. doesn’t do so well.
But no matter what I think about the medal count, the New York Times website has a seriouslly cool interactive graphic tracing the medal counts all the way back to 1896. To see it for yourself, click here.
Comments
Has anyone tried plotting this by national population and GDP?
Posted by: Clyde Wilcox | August 24, 2008 11:40 PM
In the lead up to the 2008 games there was talk in the news about econometric attempts to model gold medal acquisition by population, GDP, and host country. Seeing as this is a political science blog, it doesn’t seem out of place to ask if anyone has added Polity scores to the mix to see if it improves the model at all?
Posted by: Kevin | August 25, 2008 12:41 AM
Nice, though the interface can be a bit misleading, as some countries drop at various points due to boycotts.
The econometric models for forecasting medals are interesting, but don’t tend to account for the effect of doping. This is pretty critical since trends in the performance of some countries seem to have been linked to particular ‘programmes’ (both state-sponsored and private). The decline of US sprinting performance has coincided with the rise of doping controls - and the various controversies over BALCO. Very much unrelated to GDP. And the UK haul this time round is linked to government investment in particular sports where the medal return per £ seems to be high (unlike track and field).
Posted by: Will | August 25, 2008 05:47 AM
The UK Channel 4 website has an interactive tool that allows you to explore medal tallies wrt GDP, population, etc:
http://c4news.com/livepages/olympics2008/c4/olympicsResults.html
There may also be something on Many Eyes?
http://ouseful.wordpress.com/2008/08/24/more-olympics-medal-table-visualisations/
tony
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August 25, 2008 06:17 AM
That is an incredible graphic.
One question: what happened to the country called “Mixed Teams?”
Posted by: RE | August 25, 2008 10:31 PM