Glancing through the table of the Beijing 2008 olympic medals count made me curious about what is more important to be near or right at the top. Actually what triggered curiosity was the fact that India had only one medal at the time. And India’s population is enormous. Just like China’s. Just that China is leading. Another trigger is the fact that I come from Slovenia, a country with a population just above 2M. And we have 5 medals.
To get an answer I downloaded some GDP and population data from the world bank website and overall medal standings from the Beijing 2008 official website. After some data alignment a plot was created using R, the environment to statistically explore data sets. Each point of the graph represents one country. Blue circles represent countries whose athletes won at least one medal in Beijing. Their size correspond to the number of medals won. Red crosses represent countries not winning any medals. The position of the points (red and blue) on X axis represents log of its population number, while Y axis plots log of GDP per capita.
The first pattern that appears on the figure is the upper right triangle containing big blue points - representing countries winning the most of the medals. So GDP per capita matters. So does population size. Also left side and bottom of figure representing countries too small or too poor to win any of the medals.
Interesting are countries from former communist block with not so much wealth, but with great tradition in sports and population big enough to also win slightly bigger chunk of medals - such countries are Ukraine, Belarus, Romania, Kazakhstan, Poland, etc.
Countries from Africa mostly populate area in the lower part of the figure, where three examples stand out: Kenya, Zimbabwe, and Ethiopia. I believe mostly they won athletic competitions where they’re known for mastering long distance running.
What follows is the R code used to create this graph, where country, pop, gdppc, all, and color represent countries’ name, its population, its gdp per capita, sum of medals (gold + silver + bronze), and color representing whether the country won any medals at all (blue) or none (red):
postscript(file='beijing.ps')
plot(log(pop), log(gdppc), cex=all, col=color, pch=16)
text(log(pop), log(gdppc), labels=country, pos=4)
dev.off()
Conclusions? The rich can definitely play, and size matters as well.
