Which country has the most medals per capita?

[ad_1]

photo: AFP

New Zealanders have probably been asking this question since New Zealand first competed as a national team at the Olympics in 1908: “But if we split the medal table by population, wouldn’t New Zealand win?”

Sure enough, the question has come up again. According to Google Analytics, New Zealanders have been Googling variations of “total medals per capita.” It provides us with a very convenient way to top the medal count and surpass that annoyingly talented brother, Australia.

In the official statistics of the Paris Olympics, the population of a country is not a factor. Gold medals are king. If two countries are tied in population, then silver and bronze medals will determine a country’s position in the rankings.

One of the gold medals the Black Ferns brought back.
photo: RNZ/Finn Blackwell

Officially, the United States has one gold medal ahead of China (30 to 29), which is pretty significant considering the size of their populations and the money they pour into their Olympic programs (and the fact that they’re locked in a Cold War-style race to be the world’s superpower). Australia is a distant third with 18 gold medals. New Zealand is a distant third with 12th.

But of course, if we answer the original question, New Zealand has beaten almost everyone, including China, the United States and (yes, yes!) Australia. This is according to the Medals Per Capita website, which is founded by a New Zealand computer scientist, which is not surprising (also, the medal count is not up to date, but let’s ignore that for now, because this whole story is about skewing the data to suit us).

On a per capita basis, New Zealand ranked fifth. Australia slipped to eighth. The United States ranked 42nd, while China, with a population of more than a billion, ranked 67th.

New Zealand gold medalist Finn Butcher stands on the podium during the medal ceremony at the Wells Nautical Stadium in Weils-sur-Marne after the men's canoe cross-country final in the canoe slalom event at the Paris 2024 Olympic Games on August 5, 2024. (Photo by OLIVIER MOLIN/AFP)

Finn Butcher won gold for New Zealand in the canoe cross-country event.
photo: OLIVIER MOLIN/AFP

The Caribbean nations of Dominica (population 67,408) and St. Lucia (population 184,100) topped the per capita medals table. St. Lucia’s Julian Alfred won her first-ever Olympic gold medal in the women’s 100 meters.

We are not the only ones who think positively about medal totals. Some U.S. news organizations give equal value to gold, silver, and bronze medals when measuring medal totals (which makes no sense).

That leaves the United States far ahead with 103 medals, while second-placed China has 73 (as of Friday in New Zealand). This approach has led to criticism of American exceptionalism.

“Every country in the world is ranked by gold medals, never by total medals,” Australian Bradley Judd wrote on the X website. “But this country insists on ranking by degrees Fahrenheit and pounds, when almost no other country does.”