AMERICANS are celebrating another triumph at the Olympic Games. Their total medal tally of 103 once again put them comfortably ahead of their nearest rivals, Russia, and has produced predictable chest-thumping in the United States media.
It is a familiar position for the United States since the Cold War ended. Although China is emerging as an Olympic power to match its steadily growing status as an economic and political giant, it will have to wait at least until Beijing in 2008 before it eclipses the US. So Americans can still feel comfortable that — for at least one more Olympiad — the world is just as it should be.
But a more balanced (or at least economically literate) look at the medals table offers something much more revealing about America’s performance. The US is both very large and very rich, with a gross domestic product (GDP) twice that of its nearest rival. The country accounts for almost a quarter of the world’s economic activity. The US should be, given these enormous advantages of wealth and population, streets ahead of other nations in the fight to top the medals table.
But adjusting the total number of medals won by each country for its GDP gives a rather different picture. The US drops from superpower top to also-ran bottom of the Olympic medal-winners table (qualification is a minimum of ten medals). With each medal costing a whopping $104 billion (about £58.02 billion) of output a year, the US is the least productive Olympic medal-producing country in the world.
China does not do much better. Though it has shot up the medals table in the past 12 years, its improvement has still not matched its economic growth. Measuring its national income by what economists call purchasing power parity rather than exchange rates eliminates the vagaries of overvalued and undervalued currencies and gives China a score of just better than that of the US, at $91 billion per medal.
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The top output-adjusted nation, in a double blow for American self-esteem, turns out to be Cuba. Its tally of 27 medals, including nine golds, was produced by a national economy that is one four-hundredth of the size of the United States, making it, on this score if no other, 100 times more efficient, giving Fidel Castro one more reason to thumb his nose at his bigger, wealthier neighbour.
In fact, the output-adjusted medals table shows the enduring legacy of the Cold War. The top five countries and seven of the top ten are former members of the Soviet bloc, still punching above their weight in sport in ways that they can only dream about in economic terms.
Beyond the former communist bloc, Australia once again demonstrated its remarkable capacity to outperform its small economic weight in the sporting world. Imagine how the Aussies would look if rugby and cricket were Olympic sports.
Among European Union countries, Greece can add another feather to its cap after winning football’s European Championship. Home advantage enabled it to grab the honour of top-performing nation among the old EU members (excluding the mostly Eastern bloc neophytes added this year). Close behind is the Netherlands, while Spain takes the gold medal among larger EU countries.
More striking, though, among the EU is the remarkable bunching in terms of output-adjusted sporting prowess of the big countries, with Britain, France, Germany, Italy and Spain achieving a score within a few billion dollars per medal of each other. It almost looks as though the medal totals were allocated by some European Commission agreement on qualified majority voting.
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Among those that failed to make the qualifying cut of ten medals, the African countries naturally tended to dominate the output-adjusted rankings, with Kenya and Ethiopia scoring well. In regional terms, the Caribbean can claim top honours, with Jamaica enjoying another good Games and ranking as the second-most economically efficient producer of medals.
Elitists may object to the methodology and insist that more weight be given to gold medals won, but adjusting for the gold factor does not actually change much. It took the US $300 billion of GDP to win each of its 34 gold medals, while Cuba managed nine. If there is consolation for the US, it must be in the enduring inverse relationship between freedom and medal-winning prowess.
The success of Belarus, a country that rivals Cuba in the competition for the title of least free country in the modern world, shows that dictators still believe that popular discontent can be bought off with a few medals and a lot of playing of the national anthem.