Does a country's economic power affect its success in the Olympics?: China, USA, UK...

Data prepared by the Bahçeşehir Center for Economic and Social Research (BFRC) visualizes the relationship between countries' Olympic success and their economies.

According to data prepared by Efe Gülkan and Mert Uğur Küçük from the BFRC, the USA, which finished first in the Olympics with 126 medals, also stands out as the world's largest economy.

China, which came in second in the medal count with 91, also stands out as the world's second-largest economy.

The graph reflects that medal counts are also high in terms of economic size. 

GDP PER CAPITA AND MEDAL RATIO

While medal data was taken from Wikipedia and Olympics.com, economic data was used by taking the latest available data from the IMF WEO April 2024 dataset.

The outlook for medals changes when looking at GDP per capita. Here, although Ireland ranks first in terms of income level per capita, it lags behind with 7 medals. In the top 5, Ireland is followed by Switzerland and Norway with 8 medals, Singapore with 1 medal, and the USA, which collected the most medals.

While Turkey's success in the Olympics, shown with a red arrow in both graphs, continues to be debated, it is also noteworthy that it lags behind in the number of medals while ranking in the middle in terms of income level.

News Source: 12punto