Richer Countries, More Medals?

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.

By the way, the really interesting part of the study as far as The Olympian Blog is concerned are the following medal predictions:

* that China will increase its medal haul by 14% in the 2008 Beijing Olympics but it will remain in second place behind the United States

* that Japan and South Korea will have fewer medals compared to their medal harvest in the 2004 Olympic Games

This is interesting because we will soon see in August if the Lingnan U folks got it right. We’ll keep you posted.