Who just won the Paris Olympics? (AKA How you measure really matters)

The Paris Olympics just finished today. Paris did an amazing job of hosting. As often happens with sporting events, I thought I wasn't going to be very interested this time, but got drawn in more and more over the two weeks. Lots of heroic performances and exciting battles. I am always fascinated by how different countries perform, and what causes those results. Just for fun I downloaded the medals table (from the BBC's website) and mapped it against countries' financial performance (GDP) and population. [Note: Yes I should probably have better things to do with my Sunday afternoon.] Take a look at the charts. In terms of gold medals, China and the US are joint winner with 40 golds each. The US was the outright winner in terms of overall medals, with 126, compared to China's 91. But if we factor in the resources countries have at their disposal, in terms of money and population, we get quite a different picture. Dominica tops that table. Dominica's one medal is equivalent to 874 per trilliion dollars of GDP. The US's haul equates to just over 4 medals per trillion dollars (#71), and China's around 2.5 (#80). Grenada tops the table of medals per million people, with its two medals equating to nearly 15 per million people, compared to only 0.4 per million for the US (#47), and 0.06 for China (#75). As a Brit, I am proud to say that as well as coming sixth in terms of golds and third in terms of all medals, the Great Britain and Northern Ireland team netted the equivalent of 16 medals per trillion dollars of GDP (#38), and 1 medal per million people (#25). There are obviously lots of reasons why what I have done here is questionable. Firstly because I haven't really checked and triangulated data sources, and I have only taken latest figures, not figures over time. Second because my input factors (money, people) are way too simplistic - I haven't factored in amount of income that can be/ was used for non-essential things like sport, the age distribution of the population, their history of economic development etc. Or even the fact that many athletes in smaller countries train in larger ones. One could also argue that including very small countries that won medals distort the story. I also did this quickly, and probably made mistakes. But hopefully, like me, you still found this interesting as a reminder of the different ways to measure things. As Jacques Derrida never quite said, how you measure isn't neutral. Happy Sunday. #unthink #unask #unlearn #Olympics #Paris2024