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
According to this study: onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/ssqu.13436
Population size is of second tier importance behind economic factors, and the effect isn’t linear, but an “inverted u” where tiny nations suffer, mid-size to larger nations do better but very large countries fall off due to lack of resources to continually scale investment into ever larger talent pools.
The winter Olympics throws the economic needs of elite sport into sharp focus because unlike athletics, most winter sports require more money for equipment, facilities, training etc to develop high end athletes, poorer countries punch above their weight in things like long-distance running where it’s relatively cheap to train an athlete compared to alpine skiing or ice hockey. Hence why the winter Olympics is dominated by wealthy countries almost all of which are either in Europe, North America or China/Korea/Japan.
The only outliers to that are Brazil who had a downhill skier who competed his whole career for Norway before retiring and deciding to compete again under a different flag and Kazakhstan who (no disrespect to his performance) won because the favourites all unexpectedly messed up.
Your post has a lot of relevant factors, but you forgot to mention the prevalence of snow and ice.