The Olympic motto, "Citius, Altius, Fortius" (faster, higher, stronger) might be good inspiration for an athlete training for the games, but for a nation looking for Olympic glory, a more useful dictum might be "maior, ditiores, communistarum" -- bigger, richer, communist. While upsets are always possible in any individual event, the factors that make a nation an Olympic powerhouse are pretty clear, and it's surprisingly easy to predict which countries will come out on top.
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Shortly before the 2000 Sydney Olympics, two economics papers appeared within days of each other looking at the determinants of gold medal success. Remarkably, both came to virtually the same conclusion about what makes a nation an Olympic champion. Ever since then, the lead authors of each paper, Andrew Bernard of Dartmouth's Tuck School of Business and Daniel Johnson of Colorado College, have been using these factors to make predictions before each Olympics, sometimes with uncanny accuracy.
"When we compared [the final medal count] with the expected result in 2000 we thought we had made a horrendous error. It was like a .96 correlation. You don't get that sort of result in an economic model," says Johnson. But Johnson soon realized this shouldn't actually be that surprising at all, as overall Olympic success is remarkably predictable. By far, the most important factors are population size and gross domestic product (GDP) per capita.
The models don't look at individual athletes or sports, but national team performance as a whole. "Olympic athletes are like complex machines. The more people there are, the more machines there are. The more resources-per-person each country has, the more these machines can be invested in and turned into Olympic athletes," says Emily Williams, a recent MBA graduate from Tuck and Ph.D. candidate at London Business School who has taken over the work on Bernard's model for predicting the London games. GDP, in particular, is a large part of why the United States holds a nearly insurmountable lead in the all-time count with 2,296 medals -- whereas Russia/Soviet Union comes in a distant second at 1,327. (Russia's historical performance is perhaps more impressive given its much lower GDP and population figures and it also holds a clue as to what can make a nation punch above its weight.)
This may seem intuitive enough, but there are a couple of other ways a country can gain a leg up. One is to actually host the games. This might be partly due to home-field advantage -- less travel, familiarity with the facilities -- and partly because the host country tends to field more athletes, but it's also because countries tend to invest more in sports generally when they host the games. Whether or not countries actually make money on the Olympics, hosting can be a powerful signaling mechanism for a country looking to prove its place in the global economy. And that signal ideally includes fielding competitive athletes in addition to building shiny new stadiums. Greece, for instance, took home 16 medals in 2004, when it hosted the Athens games, but only four in Beijing.
One other factor that both papers found helps countries rake in the medals is a bit more surprising: communism. Throughout the Cold War, when medal counts became a matter of not just national but ideological pride, communist governments like the Soviet Union and East Germany were able to much more efficiently allocate government resources to build sporting powerhouses and consistently outperformed predictions made on size and GDP alone. This wasn't just true for the Eastern Bloc. Cuba, for instance has won more than twice as many summer Olympic medals as Brazil, despite having only a fraction of its wealth and population.
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