Olympic Predictions: Who Will Be the Overall Champions

Remember Luciano Barra? In case you forgot about him already, Luciano is the Italian sports official who predicted that the United States will retain its overall championship crown during the Beijing Olympiad. In fact he crunched out the numbers for the top three nations: United States: 98 medals (47 gold); China: 89 medals (38 gold); and Russia: 88 medals (32 gold).

As we noted here, Barra based his projection on the performance of athletes in international competitions.

Anyhow, while we are in this Olympic crystal ball-gazing mode, here’s the take of a Filipino writer named Manolo Inigo who believes that China looms “as the heavy favorite to rule the 29th Olympic Games in Beijing”.

He thinks that China can win a) because of its crowd support advantage and b) because it consistently made “big strides in past Olympics”.

I’m not sure if those are good enough predictors but let’s see how China’s medal haul improved from the 1988 Seoul Olympics to the 2004 Athen Games:

1988 Seoul Olympics: 28 medals (5 golds); 11th place overall
1992 Barcelona Olympics: 54 medals (16 gold); 4th place overall
1996 Atlanta Olympics: 50 medals (16 gold); 4th place overall
2000 Sydney Olympics: 59 medals (28 gold); 3rd place overall
2004 Athens Olympics: 63 medals (32 gold); second place in the gold medal count, third place in the number of total medals.

Given this remarkable improvement, it’s not surprising that people are wondering whether China can beat the United States in the medal race. What do you think? What does your crystal ball tell you?