Pound for Pound

No, not Richard. I'm talking about Canadians and our inability to keep any sort of perspective on our medal count at the Beijing Olympics. It was a long while before we won our first medal, none until Day 8 when we won three, but since then the results have come in pretty fast. As of this post we have thirteen medals, well short of the overall medal leader U.S. (79) and gold medal leader China (43). We're seventeenth overall and this has caused, at least to a lot of people I've talked to in person, a lot of anxiety. "Yeah, but look how many more the U.S. and China have. Our athletes are choking/not funded enough while our government doesn't fund them enough/doesn't fund them properly." Bitch bitch bitch. Honestly. We're a pretty small country, remember? Our population is 1/50 of China and 1/10th of the U.S. and we have around 1/6th of the medals those countries have. We're pretty lucky that we're even able to COMPETE in all the events, let alone win some, given how bloody cold it is here. Have some pride Canadians! Pound-for-pound we're pretty damn good!

But how good, exactly? I was going to let it go, assuming we've done better than most other countries with maximizing our resources, but now I'm curious as to where we stand in terms of medals per population ratio. There's other ways to determine medal efficiency of course, you could look at funding per medal or facility square footage but I don't have those numbers. Looking at population is still a good measuring stick; it basically tells us how much success a given country can produce with the resources they have. It also ignores a countries' spending methodology and simply looks at results, and after we've determined who's done the best with what they have that you'd go and look at how they've allocated their resources. I'll look at the top twenty countries in the current medal standings, which will of course change but I'm interested in this NOW, not in a week, so we're rolling ahead. Also, the medal rankings are done by the number of gold medals, not total medals won, so I just went with that list. I didn't realize that until after I'd done all the copying and pasting, but it's still the official rankings so whatever. The population numbers come from Wikipedia, which uses the most recent census figures.

Country	Medals	Population	Population per one medal
Jamaica	5	2804332	560866.40
Australia	35	21370000	610571.43
Netherlands	13	16408557	1262196.69
Slovakia	4	5379455	1344863.75
Great Britain	33	60587300	1835978.79
South Korea	24	49044790	2043532.92
Czech Republic	5	10403136	2080627.20
France	29	64473140	2223211.72
Canada	13	33351000	2565461.54
Ukraine	17	46372700	2727805.88
Romania	8	22246862	2780857.75
Germany	28	82217800	2936350.00
Italy	19	59619290	3137857.37
Russia	42	142008838	3381162.81
United States	79	304909000	3859607.59
Kenya	8	34707817	4338477.13
Poland	8	38116000	4764500.00
Spain	9	45200737	5022304.11
Japan	22	127433494	5792431.55
China	76	1321851888	17392788.00

China, not surprisingly, comes in a distant last with 1 medal per 17,392,788 people and a big KUDOS to Jamaica for abstaining from their other interests to lead the way, just ahead of the always impressive Australia. Canada finishes in a rather pedestrian 10th place, meaning that relative to the other top 20 countries in the medal standings, we couldn't be more average. So, in keeping with the stream-of-conscious approach to this entry, I've proven myself pretty wrong but won't re-write the introductory paragraph. Still, compared to the two top countries, China and the U.S., we're pretty darn efficient. Compared to some of our little brethren though, we've got some efficientizing to do and so perhaps some of the national complaining has merit.

But it's still pretty damn cold here, so there.