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Norway (population: 5.7m) beats US (342m) to top Winter Olympics medal table
(www.theguardian.com)
this post was submitted on 22 Feb 2026
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That's a completely irrelevant metric though, India (1.47bn) got no medals at all.
It isn't irrelevant at all, obviously population size is one of the most important variables when it comes to gold medals, another one is availability of winter sports, another is national wealth and investment in sports & athletes.
It's a good thing that Nazi USA didn't top the table. It is a disgrace that Israel was allowed to compete. The IOC is complicit with genocide.
Why you gotta bring up old shit?
It's been at least three minutes since we did something fascist.
The article ignores every other factor and purely focuses on population size, economics will always defeat population size when it comes to finding and developing elite athletes.
And please can we go just five minutes without bringing nazis and genocide into every conversation, it's exhausting.
Norway (GDP: $480,000 - 550,000; PPP: $510,000 - 620,000) beats US (GDP: $28,750,000 - 31,820,000; PPP: $25,680,000 - 31,820,000)
Norway (GDP per capita: $86,700 - 96,600; PPP per capita: $91,100 - 109,500) beats US (GDP per capita: $84,800 - 92,800; PPP per capita: $75,500 - 92,900)
18 gold and 41 total versus 12 gold and 33 total.
Norway (1 gold for $5,100 per capita) beats US (1 gold for $7,400 per capita).
Is that better? Or does that make silly confusing headlines for the average person?
Unfortunately Nazis and genocide are a reality of life today, well done you if you can insulate yourself in a bubble to ignore it but that won't last long if they're allowed to proliferate.
They use propaganda to push the narrative that the US is the best at everything, since about as long as anyone alive can remember. I think we can excuse The Guardian doing the same in the opposite direction to push the narrative that they're not the best, and that in fact a social democratic country is better.
If you don't like it, do something about it. It's good that it makes you uncomfortable. That's a message from your conscience, maybe you could act on it.
You don't know a single thing about what I may or may not have done about any of those issues. Like you don't know if I've been on anti-war and anti-fascist marches, contacted representatives, asked questions at town-halls or anything else. But fuck me for posting a comment online right? What a nazi apologist I must be.
With that level of reaction, yeah, you're definitely doing nothing except complaining. I didn't call you a nazi apologist, but now I gotta wonder. Waah waah wah, how dare people expect things from me.
Interacting with people like you is even worse than with the actual fascists.
Grow the fuck up. People are dying. You make me sick.
imagine howeit is for the victims of said nazis and mass murderers⦠sorry it cramps your style
It would be interesting to actually do the math regarding how much of a predictor population size is.
I'd guess that beyond a relatively low saturation level of a few millions you get enough people with raw talent in each given population that the other factors you listed (funding, methods, support structures, etc.) make the actual difference
According to this study: https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/ssqu.13436
Population size is of second tier importance behind economic factors, and the effect isn't linear, but an "inverted u" where tiny nations suffer, mid-size to larger nations do better but very large countries fall off due to lack of resources to continually scale investment into ever larger talent pools.
The winter Olympics throws the economic needs of elite sport into sharp focus because unlike athletics, most winter sports require more money for equipment, facilities, training etc to develop high end athletes, poorer countries punch above their weight in things like long-distance running where it's relatively cheap to train an athlete compared to alpine skiing or ice hockey. Hence why the winter Olympics is dominated by wealthy countries almost all of which are either in Europe, North America or China/Korea/Japan.
The only outliers to that are Brazil who had a downhill skier who competed his whole career for Norway before retiring and deciding to compete again under a different flag and Kazakhstan who (no disrespect to his performance) won because the favourites all unexpectedly messed up.
I don't think so, really. Professional athletes sometimes have rare mutations which give them an advantage in their sport. More population is always going to yield more potential. Investment is obviously critical too, but investment also scales with population size, so you could say it's a second-order effect somewhat.
But consider this:
Let's say the raw talent in e.g. Skeleton bob are normally distributed around the world.
So of the top 10000 most talented people in Skeleton, about 1700 of those would be born in China, about 6 in Norway - a factor of about 280x difference.
So to offset the 'natural talent' disadvantage of low population size, Norway would need to be 280x more effective in discovering the talent available in their population than China.
And I think that's pretty reasonable to suppose; consider e.g. likelihood of being exposed to a highly specific winter sport in your youth, likelihood of living in a geographical area where talent could show itself (i.e. the mountains), likelihood your family has the material means to support a niche winter sport in the first place until you are discovered, etc.
By my rough estimate, any of these likelihoods are way higher for any given Norwegian child due to cultural, socio-economic and other structural factors.
So while e.g. China might have the greater raw pool of talent in Skeleton compared to Norway, at the end of the day, Norway probably offsets this through better talent discovery in this niche discipline. So the raw talent of the roster of people walking into the Olympic training camps is likely pretty comparable.
(Note that this argument is not about China, Norway, or Skeleton specifically but about nieces and structural filters in talent discovery. In a discipline like 200m free style swimming where China has massive discovery potential the numbers of course weigh considerably heavier)
All the countries mentioned in the article that have 10+ times bigger populations, like USA, Canada, Italy Germany, have about equal winter sport opportunities, economies and traditions to Norway.
So it is absolutely an impressive feat by Norway to take home the most gold medals when they are vastly outnumbered by several other countries.
Obviously countries that have no winter sport traditions, and have no opportunity for winter sport are not relevant to this comparison.