Piling up the prizes

By The Economist online

How many athletes does it take to win a medal?

IN THE 1970s and 1980s the summer Olympics were dominated by athletes from communist countries. The combination of talent, dedication, state intervention and some dubious training regimes often left Western competitors on the starting blocks. The effectiveness of the methods used can be seen in our charts below, which examined the records of all the countries (or territories) that ever sent teams to a summer Olympics, including several that no longer exist. East Germany won a medal for every 3.3 of the 409 competitors it sent to five games between 1968 and 1988. Those unathletic West Germans had to send six more. Indeed, with a population of less than 20m the GDR came second in the gold-medal table in 1976, 1980 and 1988, behind the Soviet Union each time. And while some countries owe their medals to success across a variety of sports, others have benefited from specialisation. Ethiopia's 38 medals, for example, have all come on the track and at distances of 3000m or longer.

At least those countries above have won something. All the teams below have failed to get an athlete onto the podium at all, which is understandable for tiny Tuvalu, less so for Bangladesh. One country that might be optimistic about moving into the medal-winning league this year is Grenada, for which Kirani James is one of the favourites in the men's 400m.