olympics

So the apple of the SSC's eye, Ronald Susilo, lost his quarter-final match while I was walking to Justin's house to play mahjong, and i thought it would be nice to put into perspective exactly how pathetic the state of singapore sport is in. I know what they say about lies damn lies, but let's think about the situation in terms of stats nonetheless.

What possible factors might correlate with how successful a country is in sport?

1) GDP per capita
Singapore is 27th in the world at US$24000, and (as everyone and his goldfish knows because they report it in every damn article on the Olympics that gets published here), we have one silver medal. More than half the countries in the top 25 list in GDP per capita are also top 25 in total Olympic medals over the past 100 years (USA, Sweden, France, Britain, Germany, Switzerland, Denmark, Canada, Belgium, Australia, The Netherlands, Japan, Finland, Italy).

2) Incentives
I believe there was something in the papers about Singapore having the highest monetary incentive in the world for winning an Olympic medal (at $1 million bucks, is that a surprise?) So no disadvantage there.

3) Expenditure on sport
You can view that here. I don't know what that is in comparison with other countries, but whatever the case, it's substantial.

Well, OK, that's not so great. Maybe success at the Olympics is a function of population size. More people, more talent, right?

Sydney Olympics 2000, medals per 1 million people:

1. Bahamas: 6.78 (population 294,982; medals 2)
2. Barbados: 3.64 (population 274,540; medals 1)
3. Iceland: 3.62 (population 276,365; medals 1)
4. Australia: 3.03 (population 19,169,083; medals 58)
5. Cuba: 2.64 (population 11,096,395; medals 29)
5. Jamaica: 2.64 (population 2,652,689; medals 7)
6. Norway: 2.23 (population 4,481,162; medals 10)
7. Estonia (!!) 2.10 (population 1,431,471; medals 3)
8. Trinidad & Tobago: 1.70 (population 1,175,523; medals 2)
9. Hungary: 1.68 (population 10,138.844; medals 17)

So no real correlation there: 6 of the top 10 have significantly smaller populations than ours; Norway is about on par with us.

Where are we in context? In the overall rankings, we are joint 107th (also known as last), in the esteemed company of Burkina Faso, Ecuador, Zimbabwe, Ceylon, Ivory Coast, Senegal, Smyrna, Tonga, Vietnam, the Virgin Islands, Barbados, Bermuda, Djibouti, Guyana, Iraq, Kuwait, Kyrgystan, Macedonia, Niger, Sri Lanka and Thessalonika (wtf?). We have fewer medals than Mozambique, Suriname, Tanzania, Haiti, Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Zambia, the Antilles, Panama, Qatar, Malaysia, Armenia and Cameroon, all of which have 2-3 medals.


In conclusion? We suck.