Adjusting the Olympic medal counts by GDP per capita & dollar spent per athlete?

Question

Will someone adjust the olympic medal counts by GDP, per capita income & dollar spent per athlete?

I am actually curious. How would "leveling the ground" of economic advantages/disadvantages would change the olympic medal count.... I don't intend to undermine the devotion each athlete must have to win a medal, but rather assuming all athletes are created "equal", how does the GDP and so forth affect the medal counts.....

Answer 1

Australia has it down to an exact science.  It costs almost exactly A$40M for a Gold/Silver medal and A$15M for a bronze.  If you follow the attached link, you can see a chart of Australia's actual spend/medal performance and forecast.

Answer 2

there's a page here http://channel4.com/olympics where they apply a gdp correction (or population, human rights record) but not the other figures you want.

Answer 3

Gdp per capita does not correlate  with how much is spent on athletes. Some governments have systematic  programs to train    children for international competition  from an early  age while others like the US leaves it up to families.

Answer 4

Good Q PAGRO... it is actually fairly easy to predict medal counts based on both population number (more people = more medals) and GDP (more cash = more splash) ... see the two references attached (one is a nice simple set of tables for the current olympics and the other is a fairly complex economics paper). I just use medals divided by GDP per capita. Pretty much evens things out with a few stars (China and Australia in particular) outperforming expectation. The only oddity is that countries with disasterous economies (North Korea and Zimbabwe) come out top...!!!