Olympic Winners, 2010

Since there is some debate about the best way to measure who won the Olympics (correct answer: “We all did”), I thought I would prepare the results using several different methods so that various countries could claim to be the winners.

Most of the debate, at least here in the USA, centers around do only golds count (Canada won) or do all medals count (USA won). The seemingly official method is to count all medals, but there are some other ways.

Since there are too much data to put into one post, I’ll summarize the results in this post and also point to another page that contains the unsummarized data.

Summary: Korea won the 2010 Olympic games.

I prefer to normalize the Olympic rankings by athletes or, as they are sometimes called, delegates. How many contestants did a country send to win medals? And how many medals did they win? It’s more of an efficiency rating, but I think it is better than comparing medals to the general population.

Country Athletes / Point Rank
Korea KOR 0.92 1
Netherlands NED 1.31 2
Norway NOR 1.32 3

When one adjusts the points total by number of athletes sent to the Winter Olympics, South Korea is the winner. They were the only country to earn more than one point per athlete or, as I ranked them, less than one athlete per point.

For the complete data, please view the charts on the 2010 Olympics Results page.

An argument started among them as to which of them might be the greatest.

Luke 9:46

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This little article thingy was written by Some Guy sometime around 12:36 am and has been carefully placed in the Sports category.

3 Responses to “Olympic Winners, 2010”

  1. Buckley Says:

    You may have to adjust this method, due to multi-athlete sports such as hockey, curling, 2- and 4-man bobsled, etc. Perhaps ratio of medals to overall population, in which case Canada would do very well indeed.

  2. Burrill Says:

    I’d like to see a ranking based on average finish of a nation’s athletes across all events. I don’t know if complete final rankings are available, but that could yield some interesting results.

  3. Some Guy Says:

    Ratios of medals to overall population are found at the Results by Population page.

    Norway is the clear winner there, with Austria, Switzerland, and Slovenia among those vying for second place. Canada averaged 6th place in those rankings.

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