meta-roj

first, i want to congratulate all the olympians before i spend a few minutes dissecting their event. so, congratulations olympians, and thank you to greece for hosting.

a while ago, i ran into the australian bureau of statistics’ medal count per population table. they’ve updated it with the final tallies, and it’s an interesting perspective on the olympics. it also gave me a crazy idea to go another direction. i don’t pretend to have the resources of the abs, but i do have a spreadsheet application and a web browser, so what i’ve done is combine the 1999 gross domestic product data (which seems to be the last year for which pretty much every country is represented) with the official medal tally from the 2004 athens summer games. doing that gives me a “gdp per medal” figure that looks something like this:

for this table, aggregate medal value is computed as “gold * 3 + silver * 2 + bronze” based on this data. gdp data is sourced from the international monetary fund here. gdp data for cuba, north korea and serbia/montenegro was not available from the same source and is omitted.

there’s some data for people to play with when they want to figure out how efficiently economic productivity is converted into olympic medals. now you have one answer to the question, “what is an olympic medal worth?”