Business Insight Zone

A better question for many of us is “Who CARES who won the medal count?” That, at least, was a frequent refrain when I was talking this over with some friends last night.

This is totally anecdotal, but I thought the “story” about the different methods of ranking medal-winning countries — by gold medals, by gold medals, etc. — was one of the most overworked journalistic angles of the Beijing Games.

It was clear that many Chinese wanted to privilege the winning of gold medals . . . and just coincidentally their whole Olympic program is geared toward winning the maximum number of gold medals. It was clear that many Americans wanted to rank by total medals . . . and just coincidentally the U.S. routinely comes out on top when counting total medals won.

My number is bigger than yours

There’s a business parallel here: think of all the companies — banks, car makers, telecoms, et cetera — that go to great lengths to be #1 in their industries. Ambition can be a great thing, and there can be great advantages to scale in certain businesses.

But often the simplistic focus on the top line of revenue masks problems underneath. There have been many years in which GM was the largest car maker in the world in terms of revenue, but far from the best in terms of profitability. And many mergers — such as the ill-starred combinations of Alcatel and Lucent, or Time Warner and AOL — are made with a hard focus on the top line . . . but a lot of wish-casting about the bottom line.

Per-unit measures

Getting back to the Olympic medals, this suggests a couple of obvious alternatives for how to look at the medal count. The U.S. is the richest country in the world, and China is the most populous, so at some level you expect them to perform well in medal counts.

If you look at the top several countries in the final official standings, you’ll note Australia — sixth in gold medals with 14, fifth in total medals with 46. But Australia has just 20 million people, which is one-third as many as Britain (19 golds, 47 medals), one-fifteenth as many as the U.S. (36, 110), and 1.5 percent as many as China (51, 100).

This site goes one better, sorting all of the medal-winning countries by population and GIP, resulting in these “winners” of the medal count:

• Population per gold medal: Jamaica.
• Population per total medals: Bahamas.
• GDP per gold medal: Zimbabwe.
• GDP per total medals: Zimbabwe.
• GDP/population per gold medal: Zimbabwe.
• GDP/population per total medals: Zimbabwe.

Hmm . . . I can’t recall lots of stories about how Zimbabwe was the big winner of these games. It might be worth noting that the country won four medals in total — and that they were all won by one swimmer, Kirsty Coventry.

I suggested to one of my friends that a even a rudimentary improvement on the “official” system would be to weight the medals using points, for instance gold = 3, silver = 2, bronze = 1. Using back-of-the-envelope math, this still put China ahead of the U.S., but by just three points.

The winner is?

After we had talked about this, my friend came across this site, which uses a weighted score along these lines (gold = 4, silver = 2, bronze = 1) and then divides by population. Using this system, the easy winner is . . . Jamaica.

Which, given Usain Bolt’s jaw-dropping performances in the sprints — not to mention the classical running of Veronica Campbell-Brown and the astonishing world record in the men’s 4 x 100 — seems about right.

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Also of interest:

• Yahoo: 36 facts about the Olympic medal count

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(Image of Paavo Nurmi — he of the nine gold medals — from Wikipedia.)