Category — Singapore

Our quote for the day comes from Li Jiawei and it goes like this:

“Does he want to affect my chances of winning a medal or my moods? What is his motive and why now? I am a girl after all and he knows these things will upset me.”

If you’re like, “Dude, who is Li? And who is ‘he’?”, here’s a short version of their story (you can read the more detailed version here) :

* Li is the team captain of Singapore’s table tennis team and “he” is Ronald Susilo, a national badminton player also from Singapore. They are reportedly Singapore’s best hopes for an Olympic medal.

* The two were engaged but then eventually broke up.

* After their separation, Susilo told The Sunday Times that he was mulling legal action to recover money he claimed to have put into their car and apartment.

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Do we really need a study to tell us that richer countries win more Olympic medals? My mom will tell you that such a study is a waste of resources because the answer will obviously be, “Of course richer countries win more Olympic medals.”

Now, the good folks at the Lingnan University in Hongkong obviously disagree with my mom (re: the usefulness of such study) so they set out to do an “econometric analysis of the Olympic Games“. They whipped out their calculators, pored over Olympic medal records, examined the different countries’ material wealth, did their statistical analysis thing, and came up with the following conclusion:

The results of the study show that population and income do indeed have a substantial effect on the number of Olympic medals won.

There’s really no need to translate that but we will “translate” it anyways because we want to, here it goes: “Richer countries with more people win more Olympic medals.”

So maybe my mom only got it half right. Not all rich countries win more medals. They also have to have more human resources, i.e., athletes, competing for them.

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