Slalom canoeist Jess Fox had the weight of a nation on her shoulders and delivered on the biggest stage. But her Hollywood ending wasn't without ups and downs - and some help from family, she tells Matt Walsh.
Following the spate of death by suicides amongst Indian shooters, Abhinav Bindra outlined the need for mental health support to create psychologically safe environments for athletes. Skip to main content Skip to navigation. Overall Medal Leaders 1. Individual Medal Leaders Gold.
Countries Athletes. The Bahamas had a population of approximately , in , whereas the USA had ,, - almost 1, times larger. And yet the Bahamas won two medals, whereas the US — 55 times as many. The intuition is that the US had a larger pool of possible athletes to choose from, and consequently it makes sense that it should do better, too". The simplest approach is to divide the number of medals by the population of each country.
We will however look at other types of indices that might be harder to interpret directly. Consequently, to make the league table interpretable without reference to the underlying index, we express the results as a weighted medal count.
The resulting medal count will depend on the relative sizes of the countries of the medal winners, and may change as more medals are added onto the database. We do the same for silvers and golds, as well as for total medal count. GDP , is another obvious one to re-size on, particularly when you consider how expensive sport equipment and training is.
Moreover, since GDP also grows with population size, it implicitly also takes into account population size.
Although penalising larger wealthier countries may seem intuitively "fair", our statistical team invites us to think harder about the potential arbitrariness of penalties and how they can be selected objectively. Anagnostopoulos explains:. We have been thinking of GDP or population as an "advantage" that needs to be "corrected for" by penalising. This however involves an arbitrary decision of how much to penalise by. A statistician would take a different, more objective view, where GDP is a factor that can, to some extent, explain the performance of various countries.
A different, more objective view, would interpret GDP as a factor that can, to some extent, explain the performance of various countries. Once this explanatory potential is exhausted, what 'is left' the statistical jargon for this is 'residual' can be interpreted as 'GDP-corrected' athletic skill - a purer measure.
The resulting measure is no longer a simple ratio, but a variant of a log scale, which carefully balances the numbers in a fairly complicated way. When the games are over, we will be able to analyse the results based on this work. Reassuringly, however, the main qualitative conclusion of the earlier league tables seems to persist: for instance, in , Cuba comes top, with 24 medals but a small population and GDP. Not all "superpowers" are banished, but some are: Australia, China, and Russia maintain their positions in the top 20, whereas the UK and the US are no longer featured.
Team size is also a factor - and one which our team says may be a better indicator than either GDP or population as it has already taken that into account by team selection.
And this is what those results look like for for population and GDP, compared to team size: "A sharper linear relationship is evident after taking logarithms. The full data is below - and we will update it throughout the Games.
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