Many Olympic events highlight the accomplishments of an individual athlete and so it seemed only fair to recalculate the “medal count” rankings to account for each nation’s population. The top five are Norway, Austria, Slovenia, Sweden and Switzerland and, without further ado, here are the remaining per capita stats:
Country Rank Gold Silver Bronze Total Population Medals per 10M
NORWAY 1 9 8 6 23 4,769,274 48.23
AUSTRIA 2 4 6 6 16 8,344,319 19.17
SLOVENIA 3 0 2 1 3 2,039,400 14.71
SWEDEN 4 5 2 4 11 9,220,986 11.93
SWITZERLAND 4 6 0 3 9 7,630,605 11.79
FINLAND 6 0 1 4 5 5,312,800 9.41
LATVIA 7 0 2 0 2 2,266,013 8.83
CANADA 8 14 7 5 26 33,311,389 7.81
ESTONIA 9 0 1 0 1 1,340,638 7.46
CZECH REPUBLIC 10 2 0 4 6 8,344,319 7.19
CROATIA 11 0 2 1 3 4,434,189 6.77
SLOVAKIA 12 1 1 1 3 5,406,030 5.55
NETHERLANDS 13 4 1 3 8 16,443,269 4.87
GERMANY 14 10 13 7 30 82,140,043 3.65
BELARUS 15 1 1 1 3 9,680,850 3.10
KOREA 16 6 6 2 14 48,607,000 2.88
FRANCE 17 2 3 6 11 62,048,473 1.77
POLAND 18 1 3 2 6 38,122,972 1.57
AUSTRALIA 19 2 1 0 3 21,374,000 1.40
UNITED STATES 20 9 15 13 37 304,059,724 1.22
RUSSIAN FEDERATION 21 3 5 7 15 141,800,000 1.06
ITALY 22 1 1 3 5 59,854,860 0.84
KAZAKHSTAN 23 0 1 0 1 15,674,833 0.64
JAPAN 24 0 3 2 5 127,704,000 0.39
GREAT BRITAIN 25 1 0 0 1 61,399,118 0.16
CHINA 26 5 2 4 11 1,325,639,982 0.08
Musings 
March 5, 2010 at 4:05 am
Norway Wins the Olympics…
With the Winter Olympics now behind us, countries are seeking to evaluate how they fared. In the US, there is plenty of self accolades for the record haul of 37 medals. In Russia, the poor performance of the Federation has led to the resignation of the…
March 14, 2010 at 2:19 pm
Hmmmm…I think its only fair to factor in average temperature as well. I’ve done this for some of the countries here:
https://spreadsheets.google.com/ccc?key=0AlwUtlgBgB8LdHY2V3ktWWlKN3Z3OHB1dnZpV2tuRXc&hl=en
By inspection there seems to be a pretty good correlation between the medal count per capita and the average temperature. Be interesting to do a T test on it, but my stats are a bit rusty.
Someone seems to have written a paper on something similar back in 1951, but the web doesn’t show the conclusions.
http://www.jstor.org/pss/1930983
April 20, 2010 at 7:06 pm
USA (and other large countries) probably has many times the population of Norway, living in as cold or colder climates than what you find in Norway. Also the average temperature of a country does not really tell you much in this respect unless you account for how the population is spread out. Norway is cold in the north, but most norwegians live in the south where its not as cold, on average.