What Determines Countries’ Olympic Success?

The Issue:

The success of individual Olympic athletes reflects many factors including raw talent, dedication, training, effort, experience, and even luck. But are there also country-level factors that influence which nation wins the most gold? It is possible to predict with some accuracy the relative overall performance of countries’ athletes in a cross-national comparison of medals won. Characteristics such as population size and a nation’s wealth certainly play a role. Other factors, such as whether the country is hosting the games, can give native athletes a boost. Additionally, the success of a country’s women in Olympic competition is representative of broader gender equity in that country.

Countries in which women participate more fully in the labor force tend to be ones whose women perform better in international sporting events.

The Facts:

• A nation’s population size plays a role in the country’s potential to medal at the Olympic games. The pool of potential athletes who can compete at a world-class level is bigger in countries that have a bigger population. For instance, China, with a population of 1.4 billion, has a much wider pool of people who may have inherent high-level athletic skills than countries with smaller populations. In the most recent Tokyo Olympics (held in 2021 rather than 2020 because of COVID), China had the second highest number of medals (89) behind the United States (113). But population alone cannot account for a country’s success in the Olympics. If that were the case, India, the country with the second largest population at the time, would have been expected to have won much more than 7 medals in the Tokyo Olympics and New Zealand, which has a population of less than 5 million, would have been expected to have won many fewer than the 20 medals it was awarded (see table). 

Click here for a longer version of this table.

• National income per capita plays a bigger role than population in determining a nation’s success at the Olympics. People’s ability to reach their athletic potential depends upon the opportunities afforded them to train in world-class facilities with top coaching, and these opportunities tend to be more prevalent in countries that are richer. In a 2002 study of the factors that determine Olympic success at the country level, economists Andrew Bernard and Meghan Busse found that real GDP is the single best predictor of a country’s performance. As an example, Canada’s  population of 39 million is a small fraction of China’s. In 2022, Canada’s GDP per capita was $58,400 while China’s was $21,476 (both in US dollars, controlling for differences in prices across countries, i.e. Purchasing Power Parity). These differences in income per capita help to explain how, even though China’s population is more than 36 times that of Canada’s, the proportional difference in medals awarded during the Tokyo Olympics was not nearly as large; Chinese athletes won 89 medals while Canadian athletes won 24. Bernard and Busse’s findings from the early 2000s held when I conducted a similar analysis with data from the Tokyo Olympics. I find that a country with a 10 percent higher income per capita than another country is estimated to win 6.9% more medals (holding constant the effect of population) while a country with a 10 percent higher population than another country is estimated to win 3.6% more medals (holding constant the effect of income per capita). [See here.]
• Factors other than income and population are also linked to success in the Summer Olympics. Bernard and Busse find that hosting the Olympics also tends to give a nation’s athletes an additional edge. Host countries tend to win an additional 1.8% of the medals beyond what would have been predicted on the basis of GDP alone. Japan had its best Olympic performance ever during the Tokyo Olympics, winning 27 gold medals (58 overall), which placed it third in the gold medal haul just behind the U.S. and China. Countries that had a “forced mobilization of resources” towards athletic success, which Bernard and Busse identify as former Soviet and Eastern Bloc countries, also had a higher medal share than what would be expected solely by income per capita and population. This result was also supported by outcomes from the Tokyo Olympics when Russian athletes placed third overall in total medal count, competing under the ROC (Russian Olympic Committee) flag. I estimate that this was more than double the amount ROC athletes would have been expected to win given Russia’s income and population. Finally, the researchers find there is a persistence to success; a high medal share in a previous Olympics is associated with a higher medal share in the subsequent Games.
• The success of a nation’s women in the Olympic Games is linked to the economic opportunities afforded them. Countries in which women participate more fully in the labor force tend to be ones whose women perform better in international sporting events. I find that countries with a higher female labor force participation rate had a greater number of medals awarded to their women in the 2000 Sydney Summer Olympics. Updating the data, this result continued to hold for the Tokyo Olympics. To illustrate, Canada and Spain have similar populations and comparable levels of income per capita, but the labor force participation rate in Canada is 61% (about the 75th percentile) while in Spain it is 53% (about the 25th percentile). Canadian women won 18 individual and team medals in Tokyo (of the 24 won by the country) while Spanish women won 6 (of the 17 won by the country).
• It is likely that the link between women’s sporting success and higher female labor force participation reflects overall greater opportunities afforded to women in these countries. Just as having a larger population provides an Olympic edge, it is possible that societies that provide more opportunities to a wider set of women draw from a bigger pool of talent, and this may give their women’s teams an edge in the highly competitive world of international sports. One could consider other potential explanations for what lies behind this relationship. For instance, fertility rates may be lower in countries with higher female labor force participation, which may mean that younger women have greater opportunity to participate in sports rather than raise children. Alternatively, the number of women in government may also be higher in countries with higher female labor force participation rates and, if this were the case, more public resources may be devoted to women’s sports. But in my published research on the Sydney Olympics, the effect of having a higher female labor force participation on women’s sport success holds even after taking into account these other possible explanations.