Which country has the most medals per capita?

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

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.

Officially, the US is ahead of China (both countries won 33 gold medals, but the US has more silver medals), which is impressive considering the size of the US population and the money they put into their Olympic programs (and the fact that they are in the middle of a Cold War-style race to be the world’s superpower). Australia is third with 18 gold medals, but a long way off. New Zealand is at the top of the list at 12th.

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

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 ranks fourth. Australia slips to seventh. The United States ranks 43rd, while China, with a population of more than a billion, ranks 72nd (as of Saturday morning).

The Caribbean nations of Grenada (population 112,579), Dominica (population 67,408) and St. Lucia (population 184,100) topped the per capita medals table. St. Lucia’s Julian Alfred won its first-ever Olympic gold medal in the women’s 100 meters.

Julien Alfred won Saint Lucia’s first Olympic gold medal.
photo: Photo sports

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 with 111 medals, compared with second-placed China’s 83 (as of Saturday morning New Zealand time). 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.”