What makes certain countries so good at the Winter Olympics?
As you’d expect, it’s not hard to figure out which countries win medals at the Winter Olympics. Figure 1 shows that, with the exception of Australia and New Zealand, all the medals went to counties in the northern hemisphere, with the vast majority concentrated in Northern/Alpine Europe, and North America, plus a few more from north-eastern Asia. Basically, it’s countries with cold winters that win, and it might help if you have a few mountains as well, or certainly the facilities needed to practice winter sports.
That much should be pretty obvious, but I wanted to look deeper within the list of medal winning countries to see what really sets certain countries apart. How does Norway, with a population of just over 5 million, win the most medals, and more than 4 times more medals than China?
The first thing I looked into was the climate of the countries. Here we can see the coldest and average temperature in each medal-winning country, plotted against the total number of medals won. In both cases, it shows that the colder countries tend to win more medals, with correlations of -0.53 for the coldest temperature and -0.41 for the average temperature.
I also took the coldest temperature, and multiplied it by the amount of precipitation each country receives. This is intended to give some indication of how likely, and how much snow a country might have. Again we see a pretty clear downward trend, with a correlation of -0.54, meaning that countries which are colder and receive more precipitation win more Winter Olympic medals.
I also looked at the geography of the countries and found a 0.24 correlation between the highest point of a country and the number of medals won. There was also a 0.22 correlation between the latitude of a country (taken at the capital city) and the number of medals won. These are both pretty weak correlations, but are in the direction you’d expect, i.e. having higher mountains and being more northern help you win more medals. (Although of course there are plenty of events that don’t take place on mountains)
Next I wanted to look at the sporting culture of a country. This is pretty much impossible to quantify, so I took two readily-available measures of sporting ability to see if there was any relationship to the number of Winter Olympic medals won. I used the number of medals won during the 2016 Summer Olympics and the current FIFA World Rankings. The Olympic relationship should be pretty clear, but I though it would be interesting to see the effect of footballing ability — would it encourage more general sporting ability, or channel all that ability into only one sport?
In both cases it appears that a general sporting ability or sporting culture is good for Winter Olympic medals. The correlations for Summer Olympic medals and FIFA rankings are 0.30 and -0.25 respectively. (Remember that having a low FIFA ranking is better).
Interestingly, population and income have almost no impact on the number of medals won. The correlation between population size and medals was 0.07, while the correlation between income per capita and medals was 0.13. So neither having more people, or more money seems to really pay off. One interesting thing here though is that per capita, Liechtenstein, with one medal, was by far the most successful country, with a massive 26.5 medals per million people. Norway was second with 7.5, while only 5 other countries managed more than 1 medal per million people.
