By Tom Kando
With the imminent opening of the Olympic Games in London, I thought I’d entertain you with the following timely information:
During a previous Olympic Games, Sacramento Bee columnist Marcos Bretton bemoaned the fact that Mexico had done so poorly in terms of the medal count - just as badly as “Indo-freakin-nesia.” This prompted me to compute the various countries’ medals in proportion to their population.
In the table below, I select 30 countries “of interest”, out of 86 that got at least 1 medal in 2008. http://sportsillustrated.cnn.com/olympics/2008/medals/tracker/ For the sake of simplicity, I do not distinguish between gold silver and bronze. The table ranks countries from best to worst, in terms of how many people does it take in each country to earn ONE Olympic medal?
Countries Ranked by number of Medals in Proportion to Population
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Rank
|
Country
|
Number of people it takes to earn a medal
|
1
|
Bahamas
|
150,000
|
2
|
Jamaica
|
270,000
|
3
|
Iceland
|
300,000
|
5
|
Australia
|
430,000
|
6
|
New Zealand
|
440,000
|
7
|
Cuba
|
460,000
|
8
|
Armenia
|
500,000
|
10
|
Norway
|
560,000
|
11
|
Lithuania
|
600,000
|
12
|
Estonia
|
650,000
|
12
|
Trinidad and Tobago
|
650,000
|
20
|
Hungary
|
1 million
|
20
|
Netherlands
|
1 million
|
20
|
Switzerland
|
1 million
|
28
|
Britain
|
1.3 million
|
30
|
France
|
1.5 million
|
35
|
Canada
|
1.8 million
|
37
|
Russia
|
1.9 million
|
38
|
Germany
|
2 million
|
39
|
Italy
|
2.1 million
|
45
|
USA
|
2.8 million
|
57
|
Japan
|
5.1 million
|
66
|
Brazil
|
12.8 million
|
67
|
China
|
13.3 million
|
72
|
Afghanistan
|
24 million
|
78
|
Mexico
|
36 million
|
79
|
Iran
|
37 million
|
83
|
Indonesia
|
50.4 million
|
84
|
Egypt
|
80 million
|
86
|
India
|
400 million
|
87-204
|
118 other countries with zero medals
|
∞ million
|