NomNomNorway (population: 5.7m) beats US (342m) to top Winter Olympics medal table
bearboiblakeIt isn’t irrelevant at all, obviously population size is one of the most important variables when it comes to gold medals, another one is availability of winter sports, another is national wealth and investment in sports & athletes.
It’s a good thing that Nazi USA didn’t top the table. It is a disgrace that Israel was allowed to compete. The IOC is complicit with genocide.
It would be interesting to actually do the math regarding how much of a predictor population size is.
I’d guess that beyond a relatively low saturation level of a few millions you get enough people with raw talent in each given population that the other factors you listed (funding, methods, support structures, etc.) make the actual difference
I don’t think so, really. Professional athletes sometimes have rare mutations which give them an advantage in their sport. More population is always going to yield more potential. Investment is obviously critical too, but investment also scales with population size, so you could say it’s a second-order effect somewhat.
But consider this:
Let’s say the raw talent in e.g. Skeleton bob are normally distributed around the world.
So of the top 10000 most talented people in Skeleton, about 1700 of those would be born in China, about 6 in Norway - a factor of about 280x difference.
So to offset the ‘natural talent’ disadvantage of low population size, Norway would need to be 280x more effective in discovering the talent available in their population than China.
And I think that’s pretty reasonable to suppose; consider e.g. likelihood of being exposed to a highly specific winter sport in your youth, likelihood of living in a geographical area where talent could show itself (i.e. the mountains), likelihood your family has the material means to support a niche winter sport in the first place until they are discovered, etc.
By my rough estimate, any of these likelihoods are way higher for any given Norwegian child due to cultural, socio-economic and other structural factors.
So while e.g. China might have the greater raw pool of talent in Skeleton compared to Norway, at the end of the day, Norway probably offsets this through better talent discovery in this niche discipline. So the raw talent of the roster of people walking into the Olympic training camps is likely pretty comparable.
(Note that this argument is not about China, Norway, or Skeleton specifically)