To my mind, the real winners of the Sochi Olympics were Norway, Slovenia, and Austria.
Why?
According to the “official data” The Sochi Olympic winners were Russia first with 33 medals, Norway second with 26, and Canada third with 25. Twenty-six nations medalled. While I’m delighted that Canada did so well, I got pondering what the results would be like if we looked at medals per capita for each country.
How can 8 medals from a population of 127 million (Japan) or 60 million (Italy) be compared with 8 medals from a population of just 2 million? (Slovenia). I don’t think they can. So I did the math.
I found population data on Wikipedia and divided it by the medals earned to determine the numbers of medals earned per capita. Sadly, my method drops Canada to tenth and Russia to fourteenth place, but it’s a method that is more fair.
Here are the results. The per capita number shows how many people in the nation there are for each medal (gold, silver, or bronze) at the Sochi 2014 Olympics.
country population medals per capita
- Norway 5,109,056 26 196,502 WOW!
- Slovenia 2,061,721 8 257,715 IMPRESSIVE!
- Austria 8,501,502 17 500,088
- Latvia 2,005,200 4 501,300
- Sweden 9,644,864 15 642,991
- Netherlands 16,839,100 24 701,629
- Switzerland 8,112,200 11 737,473
- Finland 5,450,614 5 1,090,123
- CzechRepublic 10,513,800 8 1,314,225
- Canada 35,295,770 25 1,411,831
- Belarus 9,468,100 6 1,578,017
- Germany 80,619,000 19 4,243,105
- Croatia 4,290,612 1 4,290,612
- Russia 145,700,000 33 4,354,545
- France 65,820,916 15 4,388,061
- Slovakia 5,415,459 1 5,415,459
- South Korea 50,219,669 8 6,277,459
- Poland 38,502,396 6 6,417,066
- Italy 59,943,933 8 7,492,992
- Australia 23,390,492 3 7,796,831
- USA 317,581,000 28 11,342,179
- Japan 127,180,000 8 15,897,500
- Great Britain 63,705,000 4 15,926,250
- Kazakhstan 17,165,000 1 17,165,000
- Ukraine 45,426,200 2 22,713,100
- China 1,360,720,000 9 151,191,111
Shawn L. Bird 
This is a great extrapolation!
Thanks. I was just pondering that if just THIS year, Norway had such amazing results, how many living Olympic medalists from the last 50 or 60 years are there in Norway? I discovered that Norway has won 329 Olympic medals. If the medalists are all still living, that’s one medalist for every 15,000 or so people. Crazy. I’m kind of pround of little Norway, even though I’ve never been there!
At some point, I stopped focusing on medal counts. I really didn’t care that the U.S. lost in hockey. Instead, I was happy for Canada.
When we focus on the human beings, and their performances, we all win.
To be honest, when the difference between first and fifth is a fraction of a second in races, I think it’s just ridiculous. If you all come in at the same second, I think you all deserve a gold medal! Team games, well, we like to beat the US. Being smaller than the state of California alone, it feels like a delicious accomplishment.
We are delighted to get anything!
lol
Interesting way of looking at it 😀
Thanks. Kind of fits with Finland’s highways that show different speed limits depending on the weather, or traffic fines that are assessed as percentage of income (which is very tough on NHL hockey players). Equity means different things!
On handicap, Norway thundered in then, and in third on line honours, kind of like racing different sail rated vessel.
I think it’s fascinating to look at the ratios! Puts a whole different spin on things.