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ABSTRACT
1. Purpose/Rationale
The current Olympic Games ranking system is susceptible to specialization bias. By behaving strategically and excelling in one discipline, a country can accumulate multiple medals and propel themselves up the rankings. We rectify this issue and propose a new ranking system.
2. Design/Methodology/Approach
Using data from the International Olympic Committee, we manually construct a new ranking system (index) that rewards diversity in a nation’s success. We then econometrically test this index to see if the traditional determinants of Olympic success transcend to this new ranking system.
3. Findings
Our ranking system finds that the most successful nations at the Olympic Games remain successful using our index. However, we identify nations such as Spain and Lithuania who under the current ranking system are viewed as perennial underachievers.
4. Practical Implications
The work is beneficial for practitioners who seek to create an unambiguously preferential way of ranking Olympic success and to certain National Olympic Committees who may use the findings to support their requests for more funding.
5. Research Contribution
We create a new functional index that helps identify who may be the sportiest nation at the Olympic Games in terms of performance.
6. Originality/Value
This is the first ranking system that reduces specialization bias from the current Olympic Games medal table.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
Declaration of competing interest
The authors report there are no competing interests to declare.
Notes
1 Even though the Olympic Charter forbids the International Olympic Committee (IOC) to produce a ranking system, the use of this medal table as a ranking system is widely accepted outside the IOC as an order or merit and extensively quoted by governments, National Olympic Committees (NOCs) and the media (De Bosscher et al., Citation2008).
2 We assume sprinting composes of the 100m, 200m, 400m, 4X100m and 4X400m relays, excluding the mixed relays.
3 The Olympic Games defines these categories as follows: A sport is defined as one that is governed by an international federation. A discipline is a branch of a sport comprising one or more events. An event is a competition within a sport or discipline where participants may receive medals, diplomas and a ranking.
4 In robustness tests we altered this to equal the number of gold medals won and the number of finalists.
5 Jackknife standard errors are used in the random effects Poisson regressions where the number of replications is based upon the number of groups.
6 Note that for graphical interpretation and to avoid a mass at zero, only countries that won more than one medal in the Summer Olympic Games from 1996 to 2016 are included in the figures and tables that showcase our index. For the regression analysis we include countries that did not attain a medal in the Olympics for comparability with existing studies such as Bernard and Busse (Citation2004) and Rewilak (Citation2021).
7 A full ranking of nations for all five ranking methods is available in the Online Appendix.
8 Athletics in this paper refers to the sport of track and field, encompassing the running, jumping and throwing events.
9 In our sample, only the US (25), Germany (24) and China (24) have won medals in more sports than Spain.
10 In addition, we find that on average nations move by roughly two places when we compare the lexicographical method and the ranking based on the number of sports a medal was attained. However, the standard deviation is 16.6 showcasing that there is lots of variability in this movement, with some countries exhibiting substantial movement - Jamaica, Kenya, etc. - whereas other nations are reasonably stable such as China and the US. Nevertheless, this offers additional evidence that the variation in rankings is not limited to a small set of countries.
11 Rewilak (Citation2021) did not use schooling or temperature as covariates.