That's a completely irrelevant metric though, India (1.47bn) got no medals at all.

They have a fantastic, data driven training in all their sports. They rock Triathlon, no surprise that they also do well in the Olympics. Very earned, those people work hard for their success

It isn't irrelevant at all, obviously population size is one of the most important variables when it comes to gold medals, another one is availability of winter sports, another is national wealth and investment in sports & athletes.

It's a good thing that Nazi USA didn't top the table. It is a disgrace that Israel was allowed to compete. The IOC is complicit with genocide.

If you take Europe as a continent, it beats the USA handily. To make it comparable, the US athletes should be grouped by state. They'd do even worse.

Norway also target sports that have large numbers of available medals that they also have a historic affinity with ie cross country skiing (36 medals total, 14 won), biathlon (33 total, 11 won), ski jump (19 total, 5 won).

Norway is also incredibly wealthy and invests very heavily in its winter Olympic athletes where USA, obviously dramatically richer has to spread its resources across winter Olympics, summer Olympics and a whole host of sports that aren't even in the Olympics.

This is the first time I've actually seen an estimate of the population size of Norway and I'm actually shocked there are so few Norwegians. I figured pretty much Scandinavian countries had a population of at least the Netherlands. That said I was aware that Denmark was smaller in population but that Norway has about Denmarks population is news to me.

To be fair, Europe gets a bit overrepresented in that regard because it can send loads of athletes as separate countries. To take the men's mass start speed skating final as an example, ten of the sixteen competitors were from the EU, but it would only be allowed to send two as a single country

On the other hand, Norway alone beat everyone of course, and European countries are eight of the top ten on the medal table

I always disliked this "which country got the most medals" bullshit. The US media does it every Olympic games, and I think it's gross.

But the US only completed as one country in each discipline while each country in Europe has the chance to earn a medal for 'Europe'. To make it comparable, either

1. each US state would have needed to field their own team and you average over the number of teams or

2. EU and the US would have needed to compete with one team each per competition

that said, Europe is indeed very successful at the Olympics per capita

The article ignores every other factor and purely focuses on population size, economics will always defeat population size when it comes to finding and developing elite athletes.

And please can we go just five minutes without bringing nazis and genocide into every conversation, it's exhausting.

For total medals in the winter Olympics, it's Norway first, Canada second, USA third.

It would be interesting to actually do the math regarding how much of a predictor population size is.

I'd guess that beyond a relatively low saturation level of a few millions you get enough people with raw talent in each given population that the other factors you listed (funding, methods, support structures, etc.) make the actual difference

Team Europe yea!!!!!!

Doesn't that happen at every Winter Olympics?

Yeah, the record we beat was our own, no US in sight.

Sweden is the big one, while Norway, Denmark and Finland are about the same.

Yeah and even Sweden is still only about two thirds of the Netherlands. I'm aware the Netherlands is very densely populated, but these Scandinavian countries are huge compared to the Netherlands, maybe with the exception of Denmark which is similar in size.

The Winter Olympics, which essentially requires snow and mountains to be successful. And it’s extremely expensive to do those sports.

We do well in a bunch of the summer olympic sports as well though. We are on the podium in Handball, track and field, Beach volleyball, rowing, etc. Not dominating like in the winter olympics. But very decent per capita there as well. So we aren't targeting winter olympics at all. We just like sports.

And please can we go just five minutes without bringing nazis and genocide into every conversation, it's exhausting.

imagine howeit is for the victims of said nazis and mass murderers… sorry it cramps your style

Norwegians have much easier access to ski resorts than most Americans. In fact, many Americans who want to compete move to places like Colorado and California to have reasonable access. From a quick search, Oslo has similar access to ski resorts as Denver. If I had to guess, though, they're less expensive and more easily accessed by public transit.

Winter sports are also just more popular in Norway. I think this is for pretty obvious climatologial and historic reasons.

Maybe I should rephrase, Norway's sports development system works on a broad spectrum approach based on sports that have universal availability and appeal within the country. All the sports you mentioned, and cross-country skiing, biathlon, ski jump etc don't require dedicated specialist facilities like ice hockey does for example.

That philosophy also happens to align very nicely with a natural affinity for, and infrastructure to develop top end talent in for those winter sports I mentioned.

can we go just five minutes without bringing nazis and genocide into every conversation, it’s exhausting.

If you don't like it, do something about it. It's good that it makes you uncomfortable. That's a message from your conscience, maybe you could act on it.

I don't think so, really. Professional athletes sometimes have rare mutations which give them an advantage in their sport. More population is always going to yield more potential. Investment is obviously critical too, but investment also scales with population size, so you could say it's a second-order effect somewhat.

Of course they do, it falls under the guise of American exceptionalism propaganda

Norway (GDP: $480,000 - 550,000; PPP: $510,000 - 620,000) beats US (GDP: $28,750,000 - 31,820,000; PPP: $25,680,000 - 31,820,000)

Norway (GDP per capita: $86,700 - 96,600; PPP per capita: $91,100 - 109,500) beats US (GDP per capita: $84,800 - 92,800; PPP per capita: $75,500 - 92,900)

18 gold and 41 total versus 12 gold and 33 total.

Norway (1 gold for $5,100 per capita) beats US (1 gold for $7,400 per capita).

Is that better? Or does that make silly confusing headlines for the average person?

Unfortunately Nazis and genocide are a reality of life today, well done you if you can insulate yourself in a bubble to ignore it but that won't last long if they're allowed to proliferate.

They use propaganda to push the narrative that the US is the best at everything, since about as long as anyone alive can remember. I think we can excuse The Guardian doing the same in the opposite direction to push the narrative that they're not the best, and that in fact a social democratic country is better.

Its sad that the federal liberals in Canada spent so much effort to build up a strong Olympic team only for the Stephen Harper to sell it all off after the 2010 Olympics.

Canada should absolutely dominate at the Olympics, but a decade of the single worst Prime Minister in Canadian history, then a decade of feels over facts has left us in a sprry place.

Congrats to Norway

You don't know a single thing about what I may or may not have done about any of those issues. Like you don't know if I've been on anti-war and anti-fascist marches, contacted representatives, asked questions at town-halls or anything else. But fuck me for posting a comment online right? What a nazi apologist I must be.

If you look at the statistics for medals per country, they’re quite strongly correlated with numbers of athletes sent. This makes sense because a given athlete can only win 1 medal in 1 event and if you don’t send an athlete to an event you have no chance to win a medal.

This is also the main reason for the host country medal bump: host country’s athletes automatically qualify for a lot of spots in the events. This means they can send more athletes than they otherwise would, so they win more medals than usual.

https://youtu.be/7Y1moFmYKu4

But consider this:

Let's say the raw talent in e.g. Skeleton bob are normally distributed around the world.

So of the top 10000 most talented people in Skeleton, about 1700 of those would be born in China, about 6 in Norway - a factor of about 280x difference.

So to offset the 'natural talent' disadvantage of low population size, Norway would need to be 280x more effective in discovering the talent available in their population than China.

And I think that's pretty reasonable to suppose; consider e.g. likelihood of being exposed to a highly specific winter sport in your youth, likelihood of living in a geographical area where talent could show itself (i.e. the mountains), likelihood your family has the material means to support a niche winter sport in the first place until you are discovered, etc.

By my rough estimate, any of these likelihoods are way higher for any given Norwegian child due to cultural, socio-economic and other structural factors.

So while e.g. China might have the greater raw pool of talent in Skeleton compared to Norway, at the end of the day, Norway probably offsets this through better talent discovery in this niche discipline. So the raw talent of the roster of people walking into the Olympic training camps is likely pretty comparable.

(Note that this argument is not about China, Norway, or Skeleton specifically but about nieces and structural filters in talent discovery. In a discipline like 200m free style swimming where China has massive discovery potential the numbers of course weigh considerably heavier)

With that level of reaction, yeah, you're definitely doing nothing except complaining. I didn't call you a nazi apologist, but now I gotta wonder. Waah waah wah, how dare people expect things from me.

Why you gotta bring up old shit?

It's been at least three minutes since we did something fascist.

Norwegians put less emphasis on competition and specialisation in their youth sports – scores are not recorded in team sports matches featuring children under 12 – and more importance on fun.

What an absolutely amazing idea. 👍 😀

Interacting with people like you is even worse than with the actual fascists.

All the countries mentioned in the article that have 10+ times bigger populations, like USA, Canada, Italy Germany, have about equal winter sport opportunities, economies and traditions to Norway.
So it is absolutely an impressive feat by Norway to take home the most gold medals when they are vastly outnumbered by several other countries.
Obviously countries that have no winter sport traditions, and have little or no opportunity for winter sport are not relevant to this comparison.

According to this study:
https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/ssqu.13436

Population size is of second tier importance behind economic factors, and the effect isn't linear, but an "inverted u" where tiny nations suffer, mid-size to larger nations do better but very large countries fall off due to lack of resources to continually scale investment into ever larger talent pools.

The winter Olympics throws the economic needs of elite sport into sharp focus because unlike athletics, most winter sports require more money for equipment, facilities, training etc to develop high end athletes, poorer countries punch above their weight in things like long-distance running where it's relatively cheap to train an athlete compared to alpine skiing or ice hockey. Hence why the winter Olympics is dominated by wealthy countries almost all of which are either in Europe, North America or China/Korea/Japan.

The only outliers to that are Brazil who had a downhill skier who competed his whole career for Norway before retiring and deciding to compete again under a different flag and Kazakhstan who (no disrespect to his performance) won because the favourites all unexpectedly messed up.

Or ice, the good type.

As we learned in Operation Barbarossa, snow hates fascists.

Huge, but full of rocks and mountains and fjords. "Arrable land" is at a premium. Norwegian farmers look at danish and Dutch fields with much envy

Grow the fuck up. People are dying. You make me sick.

Aren’t these just modes of everyday transportation to and from work and school for the Norwegian folks?

The winners didn't even try to compete. They were just there by pure accident and wanted to get home again

Noggie, here. I did actually ski to school many times as a kid.

Did you see the Norwegian skiers? They are godlike. We had nothing in those events.

As long as you get home safely, I’m happy.

Waaah, waaaah, participation medals!

-some conservative fool somewhere

So proud to see the EU flag flying high next to the Italian and Greek flags! Can't wait for France to host it next, you know they're gonna dial it up to 11.

Where's India?

Somewhere in Asia.