ANOTHER VIEW OF THE COMMONWEALTH GAMES

Guest Post by Wilson Crichton

I've been following the Commonwealth Games, enjoying the sport and deploring BBC Scotland's coverage. It seems that it doesn't matter that a Scot, in Scotland, can have his or her name garbled on BBC Scotland – M'Clean or Muhdok for instance – but that's OK since we are about to see the wonderful wonderfulness of another wonderful English athlete performing wonderfully......... Truly, the athletes of all nations are wonderful and their skills are awesome (and yes, I mean the English ones too), but the commentators' gushing I can do without.

 

“One more astonishing addition to “our” medal haul – oh! And Scotland did do quite well too” – type of comment hunted me away from the telly to look at the medal table to see the wonderful astonishingness of it all. First thing I noticed was Scotland has a lot of medals (ya dancer). Our haul is great compared with previous games. I wondered if there was a different but equally wonderfully valid way of looking at the medal tables. So, the obvious thing for me is to try put the performances on an equal footing, so how do the medal standings line up on a per capita basis...

Digging into worldpopulationreview.com/countries/, I found estimates for the population of all countries in the medal table for July 28th except Isle of Man and Northern Ireland. These I picked up from google. Divide the population in millions  into the medal haul for each country, and order by Gold, Silver and Bronze in that order and by quantity (I think that's consistent with the conventional medals standings), lead to quite a wonderful set of results.

	Pop x106	medal standing		total Gold	total Silver	total Bronze	Grand Total
1	5.2	3	SCO	2.50	1.54	2.31	6.35
2	1.1	14	CYP	1.82	1.82	1.82	5.45
3	4.5	6	NZL	1.78	1.78	2.44	6.00
4	23.3	1	AUS	1.29	1.07	1.37	3.73
5	3	8	WAL	1.00	3.00	3.33	7.33
6	2.8	13	JAM	0.71	0.71	1.07	2.50
7	5.3	11	SIN	0.57	0.19	0.19	0.94
8	56.1	2	ENG	0.48	0.43	0.41	1.32
9	35.1	5	CAN	0.26	0.09	0.34	0.68
10	52.9	4	RSA	0.17	0.13	0.15	0.45
11	29.8	9	MAS	0.10	0.17	0.13	0.40
12	44.6	12	KEN	0.04	0.07	0.00	0.11
13	22.4	15	CMR	0.04	0.04	0.04	0.13
14	173.6	10	NGR	0.02	0.02	0.02	0.06
15	1255.7	7	IND	0.01	0.01	0.01	0.02

Nations with populations of 5.3 millions or less dominate the top 7 places in this medal standing with the notable exception of Australia. Is Australia different because it has a sport oriented culture? Maybe the real exception for Australia is her performance should lie between Singapore and England (based purely on a shakey working hypothesis and her population), but she has defied this by developing her sports as she has – well done Australia! 

The group following from places 8 to 13 have populations from 30 to 56 millions. With the exception being Cameroon, having a somewhat lesser population. Similar in population to Australia but with a much reduced medals performance by comparison. Perhaps she too, should perform somewhere between Singapore and England if my cod analysis has merit. I'd say wealth plays its part in this equation. That said, Cameroon is only behind South Africa and Kenya, thus being the top three African nations - Go Cameroon!

You'd imagine that this group of countries would have a commensurately greater pool of athletes to develop and choose from. So, there would be more qualifiers, in a greater number of events, and those that did qualify would be more likely to win, not so though.

No surprise that the top of this table is dominated by relatively wealthy countries in the commonwealth (so the wealth isn't so common after all). 

To change tack slightly, years back, football pundits explained we are too small to compete and that was why we no longer qualified for the World Cup or the European Cup. I guess I accepted that at face value. I supposed the same rational applied to our rugby team. But, now I wonder. The data from the 28th. July suggests that wee countries can do very well in a basket of sports if there's some money to spend, so why should football and rugby be different? Do we expect to fail and so when we're proven correct, we developed a self re-inforcing failure spiral?

Good to see Scotland at the top of a virtuous table though, with Wales up there too. Maybe someone with a more socio/sport/economics background could make better sense of this or even just blow it out of the water."

++++++++++

Munguin says that he was going to go in for the Games, but he simply couldn't trust Tris to run the Republic while he was away. Tris pointed out that being pompous while looking cute wasn't on the list of games, but...it fell on deaf furry ears, like most of what Tris says.