Olympic Medal Tally - History and Statistics

It will be very interesting to see which countries win the most medals at this Olympic games in China. It is the U.S.A and China who have been at the top of the table in recent games, and with the event taking place on China's home soil they may just have an advantage this year. At the last Olympic games in Athens 2004, a total of 929 medals were awarded to team members from 75 different countries, what is interesting is how these medals were distributed both in those Olympics and throughout Olympic history.

In Athens over half of these 929 medals were distributed among the top 8 countries in the tally, producing a really concentrated effect on the tally table. The Olympic medal tally has always been concentrated to a degree with the United States being by far the biggest medal winners over the years. Throughout Olympic history, the United States team has won almost 2200 medals with 900 of them being gold. This is a really impressive effort when you see that this number more than doubles the closest competition in both the gold and overall categories.

However this is slowly changing as other successful sporting nations are rising to the challenge. Since the first Olympiad in 1896 both the number of medals and the number of different countries winning medals has been slowly increasing. What is really interesting when trying to predict the outcome of this years Olympics is when we factor in the home team advantage into the equation. A study after the Sydney games in 2000 showed that of the 17 countries who had hosted the Olympic games up until that point, 14 of them had won their greatest percentage of medals at the games that they hosted.

This home advantage if looked at through the lens of history should mean that China will do very well at these Olympic games, whether they can beat the United States will only be seen in time. Although there is a random factor to the data, it shows that the home team does on average have more medals and a greater mix of medals at the Olympic games that they host. The Olympic medal tally should reflect this and with China both hosting the games and rising in sporting prowess, it should make for a very interesting Olympic tally in 2008.