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Olympic News 

Final results are posted here.

August 24 update:  Congratulations to Beijing on a successful Olympics!  Our predictions ended up 93% on-target (92% for gold medals).  China won the gold medal race (as predicted), the US won the most medals overall (as predicted), and both nations surpassed our predictions a scant 24 hours before the Games concluded. 

So who won?  I would argue that neither China nor the US 'won' the Games, as both were expected to perform well.  After all, resources matter.  The true 'winning nations' should be the ones that did amazing things with the resources given to them.  That is, who outperformed expectations by the widest margin?

The answer, including all of our predictions and post-Games analysis of where they failed, are linked here.  There are even some cool graphs to entertain you.

If you really cannot wait 10 seconds for the download, here's my answer:

  • Kenya, Canada, Denmark, Belgium and Zimbabwe all won gold medals but were not predicted to do so (incidentally, Kenya won 5 and Canada won 3).  That makes them the ultimate 'winners' in my book.

  • Zimbabwe, Iceland, Sudan, Togo and Venezuela all won medals but were not predicted to do so (Zimbabwe won 4).  That makes them all 'winners' in my book as well.

  • Among larger medal-winning nations, Australia and Great Britain both beat the total medal predictions by over 68 percent.  In the gold medal race, Australia won 12 more gold medals than predicted, while Great Britain won 16 more than expected.   Kudos to those squads!

If you want to talk more about the results, feel free to email me.  Now that the Games are over, I suddenly have some free time on my hands.

August 17 update: Predictions for the Beijing 2008 Games are right on target!  Halfway through the medal awards, our predictions have an 88% correlation with actual medal standings (87% for gold medals alone).

These are predictions based on a model created with Ayfer Ali before the 2000 Olympic Games in Sydney (see the link to the paper below).  

Click here to access the 2008 predictions.

We will post again here right after the Beijing Games with a synopsis of where we were close, where we weren't close, and what that all means.

July 1, 2008:  Big news!  Our model predicts that we will hear the Chinese national anthem more than any other nation's anthem, with China winning 44 gold medals this year.  That's a huge prediction when you consider three things: 

1) the next nation will be the U.S. with 33 (equal to the U.S. gold medal haul in Athens in 2004) but

2) China has only won 112 gold medals at all previous Summer Olympics venues combined, while

3) the post-War record for most gold medals at a non-boycotted Summer Games is 50 by the former Soviet Union in 1972.  If our predictions hold, China would tie for the 'third most golden nation in Olympic history', and would tie the U.S. for the most golden host nation ever (as the U.S. won 44 gold medals in Atlanta in 1996).

The U.S. will still win the most medals overall (103, equal to the Athens performance), Russia will win 95 (3 more than in Athens), and China will win 89 medals overall.

Previous Olympics and predictions: We decided to continue our work, since our predictions for Torino 2006 were accurate (again).  In Torino, we correctly predicted 13 of the 14 top medal-winning nations, including a forecast of Germany at the top of the standings.  Our forecast was only 1 medal away from the final German total. Overall, we found a 0.93 correlation between forecasts and actual medals across all participant nations (0.89 correlation for gold medals alone). 

For the U.S. in particular, we predicted 22 U.S. medals (the actual count was 25), substantially closer than any other forecast of which we are aware. We forecast 8 U.S. gold medals, compared to 9 actually won. 

Our Athens 2004 Summer Games predictions were surprisingly accurate as well.  For example, we predicted 103 U.S. medals, 37 of them gold.  The American team won precisely 103 medals, 35 of them gold.  We predicted 94 Russian medals, and the Russian contingent won 92.  Details are available here.

Using only income per capita, population, climate, and political structure (along with nation-specific effects), we have explained participation and medal counts at the post-War Olympic Games.  We have published out-of-sample predictions before each of the last four venues:

Medal counts

Torino 2006 Winter Games had a 0.93 correlation with our predicted results

Athens 2004 Summer Games had a 0.94 correlation with our predicted results

  Salt Lake 2002 Winter Games had a 0.94 correlation with our predicted results

  Sydney 2000 Summer Games had a 0.95 correlation with our predicted results 

Gold medal counts 

Torino 2006 Winter Games had a 0.89 correlation with our predicted results

Athens 2004 Summer Games had a 0.86 correlation with our predicted results

Salt Lake 2002 Winter Games had a 0.85 correlation with our predicted results

Sydney 2000 Summer Games had a 0.84 correlation with our predicted results

The conclusion?  There is a measurable, continuing advantage to certain nations in the Olympic Games.  We should be aware of that fact when we compare outcomes across nations, and when we set our own national goals for medal counts.  

So who actually "won" the medal race in Torino 2006?  Canada and China both outperformed the forecast by more than fifty percent. 

 

Check the research paper published in Social Science Quarterly 85(4), p974-993.

Download our data here (citing the paper as linked above).

A history of selected press coverage is available here.

 

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  • Created by: Pamela Mullin and Kristine Ishii
  • Updated by: Daniel K.N. Johnson
  • Created: Spring 2000
  • Last Modified: August 17, 2008