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Why Australia Is Dominating the Olympics

therawfeed.com — Yahoo! Sports says the United States is "winning" the overall medal count and that China is winning the gold-medal count. But simply counting medals is like comparing national math ability among students in different countries not by averaging test scores, but adding them up. When you "normalize" for population and medal "quality," Australia wins.

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  • mikelgan, on 08/17/2008, -0/+6India puts all its sports enthusiasm into a single sport -- cricket -- which inexplicably isn't an Olympic event. Plus, of the five major factors that lead to Olympic greatness:

    1. Population
    2. Per-capita income
    3. State control of Olympic training
    4. Cultural tradition of sport
    5. Gender equality

    India is advantaged by only Population.
  • treelovinhippie, on 08/17/2008, -0/+4Australia has the weather, the open spaces and a strong sporting culture.
  • wezults, on 08/17/2008, -0/+4India has 1 Billion people and 1 medal.
  • sdigroup, on 08/17/2008, -0/+2"If you ain't first................your last..........."

    **Ricky Bobby

    USA USA!!
  • wezults, on 08/17/2008, -0/+2yes but they are headed in the right direction, with time this will change.
  • herbiehancock00, on 08/17/2008, -0/+2Cuz Stephanie Rice is hot.
  • sparkleanimesh, on 08/17/2008, -0/+2And we already felt proud about it!
  • ishay, on 08/18/2008, -0/+1Who cares? The winnings are individual and not related to a country...
  • Shogi, on 08/18/2008, -0/+1I've got absolutely nothing against Australia, but this is absurd. A silly system (that doesn't even account for his own "important" variables) applied to an already cut and dry evaluation. I understand the reasoning, (if country A was as big as country B, what would the count be) but it is incomplete and does not equate to "domination", it's more of a medaling percentage of the poulation. All this really does is handicap the larger countries just because they have more people. Dominating the olympics is about one thing and one thing only: having the most medals. If some tiny country with a population in the low thousands wins even 2 or 3 medals, they come out with some ridiculously high score.

    If you wanted a more useful analysis, take the number of medals and divide by the number of athletes. Closest to 1 wins for most successful athletic delegation.
  • wezults, on 08/17/2008, -0/+1as well you should
  • GForeman, on 08/13/2009, -0/+0Awesome!

    Good ol' Aussies. Some decent names in the top 10 of all time too:
    http://digg.com/other_sports/Australia_s_top_10_sp ...
  • luweez, on 08/18/2008, -0/+0You don't win by using the wrong "you're" either :P

    For future reference, here's a helpful link: http://www.wikihow.com/Use-You%27re-and-Your
  • dizturbd2, on 08/17/2008, -2/+1but in this case, only the Number of medals count.

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