Rankings of the 2021 Summer Olympic Games: Medals Per Capita (& ChatGPT)

I hope you enjoy the Summer Olympic games over the next couple of weeks. I plan on watching as many events as I can given my schedule. I’m on vacation this week so you’d think I can watch a lot but I actually can’t (also explaining why this week’s update is a little sparce).

Anyway – I thought it would be interesting to take a different kind of view with respect to the ‘medal count’ you’ll see in the paper each day. So…  I asked ChatGPT (which I’m trying to learn how to use) to examine medal efficiency by looking at medals per country per capita.

This gives a perspective on how efficiently a country can produce medals relative to its population size. Here’s how the countries ranked at the Tokyo 2021 Summer Olympics (according to Chat GPT)*:

1. Netherlands
   • Total Medals: 36
   • Population: 17 million
   • Medals Per Capita: 2.12 medals per million people
2. Australia
   • Total Medals: 46
   • Population: 25 million
   • Medals Per Capita: 1.84 medals/million
3. Great Britain
   • Total Medals: 65
   • Population: 67 million
   • Medals Per Capita: 0.97 medals/million
4. Italy
   • Total Medals: 40
   • Population: 60 million
   • Medals Per Capita: 0.67 medals/million
5. France
   • Total Medals: 33
   • Population: 65 million
   • Medals Per Capita: 0.51 medals/million
6. ROC (Russian Olympic Committee)
   • Total Medals: 71
   • Population: 146 million
   • Medals Per Capita: 0.49 medals/million
7. Japan
   • Total Medals: 58
   • Population: 126 million
   • Medals Per Capita: 0.46 medals/million
8. Germany
   • Total Medals: 37
   • Population: 83 million
   • Medals Per Capita: 0.45 medals/million
9. USA
   • Total Medals: 113
   • Population: 331 million
   • Medals Per Capita: 0.34 medals/million
10. China
    • Total Medals: 88
    • Population: 1441 million
    • Medals Per Capita: 0.06 medals/million

How Chat GPT Calculated the Results:

1. Medal Counts: Gathered the total medal counts for the top ten countries from the 2021 Summer Olympic Games.
2. Population Data: Collected the population data for these countries (in millions).
3. Calculation: Divided the total number of medals by the population size for each country to get the number of medals per million people.
4. Ranking: Sorted the countries based on their medals per capita in descending order.

ChatGPT: “The Netherlands & Australia stand out as the top performers, showcasing their strong sporting programs and ability to achieve high Olympic success per capita.”

* I mentioned this post to someone I’m here with in Iowa and they questioned ChatGPT’s answer… as he knew the Bahamas won two track & field gold medals in the 2021 Olympics (true).

With a population of only 400,000 that’d be 5 medals per million – far better than Netherlands at 2/million. The lesson…  make sure you double check everything you get back from Char GPT!