When we hear about the number of Olympics medals each country wins, we usually hear the total. The top five or six countries are almost always the same: the U.S., U.K., Russia, Germany, France and China. When you think about the huge population and wealth of those countries, it makes sense that they would win the most medals.
But this leaves smaller countries who perform better than their relative size and wealth out of the spotlight. Think of Australia, a country of 25 million. Compare that to America's 328 million. You might expect the U.S. to win well over ten times more medals than Australia. But that's not what happens.
So a more accurate representation of a nation's Olympic performance might be to look at the expected total. The Financial Times has put together a system that looks at a country's past medal counts, population size, and its GDP. The results are further refined by sport, given that some countries nearly always outperform others (think of gymnastics or table tennis). Putting all these things together provides a less-prejudicial view of each country's Olympic performance.
The Times has posted a real-time chart with a country's expected medal total compared to the actual ongoing total, showing the number of medals over or under expectations.
Take a look at that chart now.
METHODOLOGY (excerpt from the article): The process is based on a linear regression model. The predicted medals table is only useful for seeing where countries might rank before the start of the Games, or for assessing the complete results after the closing ceremony. It is less useful for comparing live tallies during the Games. After a few days of competition, when some countries have racked up medals in early events while others are still waiting for their strongest sports to begin, it is not useful to compare live tallies with the predicted final outcome.
To make the over/under-performance metric useful during the Games, we built an additional layer on top of the model, breaking down each country’s predicted medal count into the different sports being contested at the Games. To do this, we distributed each country’s predicted total medal count in proportion to the share of medals it won in each sport at the most recent Olympics it competed in.