What happens to the Olympic medal count if we rank per capita?


There’s been a lot of talk about which is the most accurate way to count Olympic medals. The IOC has always used gold medals to determine rankings, with everything else being secondary. Meanwhile there’s an alternate school of thought that all medals are worthy of being counted, so it’s about the total a country earns that’s important.

We count medals to determine the greatest sporting country in the world. What if instead of weighting golds, or evaluating total medals, we determined standings based on how many medals a country wins per-capita? This would mean that we could determine how many medals a nation wins per number of citizens, and can show the prowess of a nation against the rest of the world in a more accurate way.

So, without further ado, here’s how the 2024 Paris games would look if we weighted medal count by citizens. To ensure this doesn’t get too silly if there’s one outlier athlete from a tiny nation we’re going to cap the minimum total medals at 10 to qualify. This means we can still get a deeper look at the rankings, without it being too heavily biased towards the other way.

2024 Olympics per capita medal count

Rank Country Gold Silver Bronze Total Population Citzens per medal
Rank Country Gold Silver Bronze Total Population Citzens per medal
1 Australia 15 12 10 37 26,000,000 702,703
2 Netherlands 9 5 6 20 17,700,000 885,000
3 Great Britain 12 15 19 48 66,970,000 1,395,208
4 France 13 16 19 48 67,970,000 1,416,042
5 South Korea 11 8 7 26 51,630,000 1,985,769
6 Canada 6 4 8 18 38,930,000 2,162,778
7 Italy 9 10 7 26 58,940,000 2,266,923
8 USA 24 31 32 87 333,333,300 3,831,414
9 Japan 11 6 12 29 125,100,000 4,313,793
10 Spain 2 3 5 10 47,780,000 4,778,000
11 Germany 8 5 4 17 83,800,000 4,929,412
12 Brazil 2 5 6 13 215,300,000 16,561,538
13 China 23 22 16 61 1,412,000,000 23,147,541



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