The Olympic Games just recently ended, and I was looking at the medal standings when an idea struck me. The USA wound up with 113 medals, about 4.7 times as many as Canada’s 24, but they have about 9 times as many people, which means a population of say a million people would produce about twice as many medals for Canada. Of course, reality is never quite that simple – the USA could have sent thousands of athletes instead of the 613 they sent to Tokyo, and they might have won a lot more medals. Same could definitely be said for China. But I decided to take a look at the games as a whole, and to compare how many people there are in a country versus how many medals that country won. The smaller the number, the more bang for the buck that country is getting. And the best ratio of population to athletic success for Tokyo 2020? San Marino!, which is now officially the smallest nation to ever medal at the Olympics.
Tiny San Marino has only 33,900 people, but it won three medals. That’s one medal for every 11,300 people – far and away the best ratio in the world this year. Second place goes to Bermuda, population 62,000, winning one medal, but this appears an asterisk-worthy fluke, as only one medal could have gone either way. Same with a few others near the top like Grenada, but San Marino won three, too many to merely be discounted as a fluke. Not bad for the country that ranks 218th in world population. Most of the top performers are island nations and Europeans. Here are the top countries in people per medal won:
- San Marino 11,300 (3 medals)
- Bermuda 62,000 (1)
- Grenada 110,00 (1)
- Bahamas 195,000 (2)
- New Zealand 240,000 (20)
- Jamaica 333,000 (9)
- Slovenia 420,000 (5)
- Fiji 450,000 (2)
- Netherlands 475,000 (36)
- Hungary 480,000 (20)
Make sure you choose viagra prescription canada check content a reliable one to purchase this generic ED medicine. It helps in promoting good health and fight online pharmacy levitra against diseases in a very effective manner. For example – deeprootsmag.org ordine cialis on line Red Ginseng in VigRX Plus is actually Asian, in exact Korean, and Damiana is collected from South America. Apart from improving physical health, promoting psychological health is another advantage of that jelly is that this medicine start reacting fast on the body as the jelly takes lesser time to dissolve in the mouth immediately, therefore starts functioning in only cialis online from canada fifteen minutes.
Canada wound up 29th in the world with one medal per 1.57 million people. New Zealand won 4 medals less than us with about 1/8 the population. The worst performer per population was Pakistan, the world’s fifth largest country, whose team, picked from 220.9 million people, failed to win any medals for a score of infinity. It should be noted they probably have more pressing issues to address back home than tossing shot puts around in shorts, but like life itself, this list is not meant to be fair. China put on a great show and wound up second in the medal total with 88, but that works out to one medal per 16.35 million people. Again, they had to limit how many athletes they sent and for sure they left many deserving souls off the team, but in terms of numbers this looks quite bad.
San Marino is in an interesting place. If I find myself with time on my hands in Italy, I may pay it a visit. It claims to be the oldest existing nation, founded in 301 AD, and is the world’s oldest constitutional republic. It is also one of the world’s richest countries per capita, and one that can clearly afford the luxury of a well trained trap shooting team. Trap shooting accounted for two of their medals in Tokyo.