Which countries REALLY win the Olympics?

Olympic medal counts don’t really show you which nation was the most successful, because larger countries have a huge advantage. There’s a better way to measure a nation’s Olympic success. Here are numbers from the last 10 Olympics.

I spent an embarrassing amount of time making this video. Also, it's Sydney, not Sidney.

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[Musings]

Corrections: At 5:02, the dot labeled GB is actually Cuba. Great Britain is the unmarked dot on the line, just under Russia.
Also, dear Sydney: sorri.

[bw]

Norway & Australia is exactly what I expected. Both smaller countries who do extremely well in the winter & summer Olympics respectively.

[emmanueljaramillo]

Vatican city: wins one medal,
Becomes best olympic team in History

[huehue]

I don't see why the result for winter olympics was surprising. Norway has both the most medals and the most gold medals of any nation in the winter olympics. It was always gonna come out on top, especially with the low population, no matter how you crunch the numbers.

[kishore]

Norway and Australia also rank 1st and 2nd in Human Development Index respectively .

[DatProGuyK]

As an Aussie I’m bloody proud of how our country does haha

[blackflash]

Why is almost nobody in the comments mentioning the fact that a person with approximately 2000 subscribers put in so much effort into their video, knowing well, that at this point being a small youtuber and doing this type of content is such a gamble.This a person, who actually deserves to be at the top of YouTube.Well done man, keep going.

[gabrielhagen]

Norway is quite good at skiing but it is in polar bear riding we really shine

[alphainfinity]

Something to also keep in mind is that there is a limit to how many athletes can compete in an event, at 3 athletes. This would only be limiting to larger countries with a lot of depth at a sport. For instance in track and field typically more of the field than the 3 athletes who qualify from the US trials have hit olympic standard. If the Olympics was truly only taking every athlete by world rank then there would be a lot more US athletes and less small nation athletes

[protonjones]

Do Norwegians live for anything else other than the Winter Games??

[ajnode]

As an Aussie, this shit is VERY intuitive. We are very aware of the fact that while we have a relatively small population, we have, in the past few decades, made a massive splash in the Olympics.

[Youthereogre]

I had a feeling Australia would be at least top 3. Makes sense since we basically have summer temps all year ;)

[PatrickAdairDesigns]

Shouldn’t you take the number of participants each country can send to the Olympics into account? For example, maybe China has the ability to to train a lot more athletes but they don’t because it would be useless because only a few can go to the olympics. And there’s many other variables effecting the problem as well. I really don’t think there’s a way to get any sort of accurate results.

[JoeCentralGaming]

i still think it's amazing that GB beat china in the rio Olympics.

[korakys]

As a New Zealander I have favoured the per capita medal tables in the past, where we do really well, but I must admit this is a better system ---even if it does put our eternal sports rivals way out in front (sigh).

[alphadogg]

New Zealand. An absolute amazing sporting nation. Truly incredible given its size.

[jordanwignall]

The 2000’s olympics was held in Sydney, Australia not Sidney

[donaldoverbeek]

How would you not guess Norway and Australia.

[countingcards]

The UK gets loads of medals for it's size. It got more than China at the 2016 Olympics.

[dhruvseoni]

love this!
also, Australia isn't really surprising. even without the maths, australia's performance adjusted for population and economy has always been most impressive amongst the larger nations.
ive always maintained that it is the greatest sporting nation in the world.