Of Medals And Men

It beggars belief that in some circles Australia's “slipping’ to 6th place on the Olympic gold medal tally (5th in medals overall) is regarded as a disappointment or a dent to national pride.

With the exception of Jamaica and New Zealand (oh no! how did those words get in here?!!), Australia is the greatest, consistent, puncher-above-its-weight in international sport by a country mile.

But Australians are probably also world leaders in unrealistic expectation as far as their athletes and sportsmen are concerned - champions at aggressive nationalism.

Australia achieves what it achieves off a population base of 21 million people. It has little right to expect the success levels it attains. But it can be unforgiving when an athlete or team fails to reproduce the level of performance expected of them.

Money is the reason for that. On a per-head basis, sport is well funded in Australia so results are seen in terms of a return on investment. These sportsmen and women are expected to be accountable. We're quick to give them a bagging if they fail to deliver. The message about participation being more important than victory features a long way down the page.

Australia is a rich, fortunate, developed country with an equable climate which encourages an outdoors ethic but by no means the only country enjoying a superior standard of living, yet it still finishes a street ahead of its peers in the sporting realm. What’s not to be happy about?

To illustrate this, it may or may not be rational to divide the population base by the number of Olympic gold medals won in 2008 to see how many people it ‘took’ to produce each gold. Irrational or not, I’m going to do it. Here’s how the table looks:

Jamaica 466,000 people per gold medal, New Zealand 1.4 million, Australia 1.5 million,
Georgia (war and all) 1.5 million, Mongolia 1.5 million, Norway 1.6 million, Slovakia 1.8 million, Netherlands 2.3 million, Belarus 2.4 million, Denmark 2.7 million, Great Britain 3.2 million, Hungary 3.3 million, Czech Republic 3.5 million, Korea, South 3.7 million,Switzerland 3.8 million, Germany 5.1 million, Romania 5.5 million, Russian Federation 6.2 million, Ukraine 6.5 million, Kenya 7 million, Italy 7.5 million, United States of America 8.3 million, Spain 9 million, France 9.1 million, Canada 11 million, Poland 12.8 million, Japan 13.3 million, Ethiopia 19.5 million, Argentina 20 million, China 23.5 million,Brazil 62 million.

The likes of India (1.1 billion people) and Indonesia (234 million people) won a single gold medal each. Must be something to do with their names. And consider some of the countries which could not field a gold medal winning athlete - South Africa, Nigeria, Sweden, Greece, Chile, Venezuela and Malaysia.

Chris Dillow, writing in The Times (of London) in the wake of British euphoria at their medals haul, used an even better way of determining success, and his article, slightly abridged for relevance, follows:

There is another league table, published recently by the World Bank, which ranks countries by national income. And this bears a striking resemblance to the medals table.

Nine of the top ten countries in the medals table are in the top 15 of the World Bank table; the exception is the Ukraine. Across all 87 countries to have won a medal, the correlation between the medals ranking and the GDP ranking is 0.41 - far higher than you would reasonably expect by accident.

In this respect, the Beijing Olympics were not unusual. In a recent paper Hon-Kwong Lui and Wing Suen, two Chinese economists, showed that population and national income per person were “major determinants” of medals won in Olympics between 1952 and 2004.

The reason for this is trivially simple. The more people a country has, the more chance it has of producing a medallist. And the richer it is, the more able it is to invest in talent-spotting or in training facilities, and the more chance it has of its sports becoming Olympic events; as Matthew Syed pointed out in these pages, sailing gets lots of medals but kabaddi doesn't.

Big economies should therefore get more medals than small ones. And they do. This suggests a different way of judging Olympic success. We should compare a nation's position in the medals table to its position in the GDP table.

On this basis, Britain's performance was no better than respectable. Our fourth place in the medals table is just one place better than our position in the national income table. The notable fact about British Olympians is their underperformance in previous Games rather than huge outperformance in these.

By this measure, I'm sad to report, the Aussies did better than us. Their sixth position in the medals table is nine places better than their national income ranking. We can, though, take comfort in the fact that Germany - fifth in the medals table - underperformed relative to its economy.

So, who are the winners and losers by this standard? The winner is the Dominican Republic. Its one gold and one silver put it 47th in the medals table, while its puny economy is only the 179th in the world. Mongolia, Zimbabwe and Jamaica also did well.

The loser is Taiwan. It has the 17th biggest economy in the world, but came a mere 79th in the medals table.

There is a pattern here. The countries that punched above their economic weight in these games - which include North Korea, Cuba and Uzbekistan - are in many cases nations not renowned for their peace, political stability or respect for human rights; Jamaica is no place to be if you are a homosexual. Many of the losers have a better record.

This vindicates Harry Lime's theory. As he said in The Third Man, warfare, terror, murder and bloodshed gave us Michelangelo, da Vinci and the Renaissance while 500 years of democracy and peace in Switzerland (35th in the medals table and 22nd in the GDP table) produced only the cuckoo clock. (Even this was wrong; the cuckoo clock was invented in Germany.)

Excellence in the Olympics, then, is no sign of a wider flourishing of a nation. Gordon Brown might care to consider this before celebrating the British results.

There is an even stronger pattern. The 2008 medals ranking is similar to the 2004 ranking. The correlation between the two is a hefty 0.8. The ranking in the Athens games alone explains, in the statistical sense, three-fifths of the variation in the Beijing rankings. Of the countries to have “medalled” most - including team GB - moved fewer than ten places in the rankings between 2004 and 2008.

In other words, history matters. A nation with a culture of winning medals tends to continue doing so; nations with no such culture find it much harder.

There is a lesson here for anyone running any large organisation. Big groups - nations, firms, government departments - have history, traditions and culture that heavily influence their chances of success or failure. These cannot easily be overridden by the mere will of a leader.
You have probably got an objection to all this. When Chris Hoy sat on his bike on the starting line, he did not look at his rivals and think: “I come from a richer nation than most of those guys; this'll be a cinch.” Instead, he focused upon giving all he could.

And this is the point. From the point of view of the individual competitor, Olympic success is about skill, training and dedication - and, arguably, perhaps even natural talent. But from the point of view of the nation, success depends upon history and economics.

In other words, overall outcomes are not necessarily merely the result of individual motivations added together. Men make their own history, but they do not make it as they please.

When the likes of Choisir, Starcraft, Haradasun, Miss Andretti and Black Mamba venture overseas and win races of high significance, we thump our chests and scream our heads off with pride. Yes, they have overcome the tyranny of distance, seasonal change and adjustment to alien styles of training and racing. But they come from the second biggest thoroughbred population on earth so they ought to be good enough.

By the way, nearly as many horses drug tested positive at these Olympics as did athletes.