Explaining Olympic medals, a follow-up

Two weeks ago, I posted some stats on the nations that were winning the most Olympic medals in the first week of the games. I thought I'd follow up with some additional charts now that the games have concluded. These are for the top 21 medal-earning nations, rather than every country, so please forgive the incomplete dataset.

I should also mention a little regression analysis I did showing that overwhelmingly the best predictor of how many medals a country won was how many athletes they sent to the games. The more you play, the more you win. Not shocking, I know, but still a better predictor than wealth. However, GDP turns out to be the best predictor of how many athletes a nation will send. So national wealth is important, but somewhat indirectly.

Anyway, charts are below the jump. North Korea, while having a great first week, fell quite a bit in most rankings. The big story now is Jamaica, a small and relatively poor country that won a ton of medals.

Medals per athlete, 2012 Olympics

I'm not surprised this statistic hasn't gotten a lot of attention so far, even though it's probably the fairest way to compare across countries.

Update: I'm not sure if this is a fairer measure, but here's medals won per million citizens. North Korea is still looking pretty solid, but Hungary's stomping the world.

Oh, and what the hell, here's the number of medals divided by nominal GDP, as reported in the CIA World Factbook.

Why the right should like soccer

I wanted to follow up on my soccer post from last week, in which I examined resistance to soccer by conservative opinion makers.  Drew Conway had a nice post showing basically no relationship between a country's freedoms and the success of its soccer team.  This inspired me to look into the relationship between wealth and soccer success.  The graph below charts out each country's per capita GDP (logged) on the horizontal axis and its FIFA ranking on the vertical axis (1 is best, 202 is worst).

The regression is negative and statistically significant (p=.001), suggesting that for each additional $10,000 a country moves up in per capita GDP, its FIFA ranking should improve by about 4 places.  However, as you can see from the smoother line, the relationship switches directions toward the upper end of income.  It looks like there's generally a positive relationship between national wealth and soccer success, but the upper end of the distribution is being distorted by some very wealthy nations (Andorra, Bermuda, Luxembourg) with disproportionately crappy soccer teams.

So, contra Glenn Beck's rejection of soccer, conservatives should clearly love this sport, since you can buy success.  It's all about social mobility.  USA!  USA!

Comments welcome, although please keep in mind that I know very little about soccer, sports in general, or countries not called the United States of America.

Update: The inflection point in the trend above is largely caused by wealthy, relatively non-populous countries with unimpressive soccer teams.  Addition national population to the regression makes a big difference, straightening out the trend and raising the R-squared from .06 to .46.  Controlling for population increases the estimated impact of GDP.  Now it appears that a country should improve about one FIFA ranking place for every additional $1,000 in per capita GDP.  Here's a partial regression plot of GDP predicting FIFA rank, controlling for population:

Drawing lines

Okay, you know what?  Forget what I just said.  I actually do have something to say about soccer.  Or at least about the conservative rejection of it.  What conservative rejection?  Don't conservative parents bring their kids to soccer practice all the time?  Well, yes, but I'm talking about the rejection by opinion-makers like Matthew Philbin, Dan Gainor, and, of course, Glenn Beck, who said (via Think Progress):

It doesn't matter how you try to sell it to us, it doesn't matter how many celebrities you get, it doesn't matter how many bars open early, it doesn't matter how many beer commercials they run, we don't want the World Cup, we don't like the World Cup, we don't like soccer, we want nothing to do with it.

So where does this stuff come from?  Is it racism?  Is it just a right wing media outrage machine trying to find some talking point for the day?  Well, maybe, but I'm going to take the position that this is actual principled conservatism at work.

What do I mean?  Well, Bill Clinton gave a wonderful speech at the dedication of his presidential library in 2004, during which he tried to explain and validate both major American ideologies:

America has two great dominant strands of political thought... conservatism, which, at its very best, draws lines that should not be crossed; and progressivism, which, at its very best, breaks down barriers that are no longer needed or should never have been erected in the first place.

I think the soccer issue is one instance where conservative leaders are simply trying to draw a line.  They feel they've made enough accommodations to other countries and cultures.  They simply do not acknowledge soccer as an American pastime and feel they are justified in trying to exclude it from our main culture.  We cannot just keep adding things to our nation and assume that the nation will still stand for anything.  Lines must be drawn.  This far, no farther.

It actually reminds me of a story my grad school mentor John Zaller told me about a conversation he'd had with a conservative colleague back in 1982 after this person had seen "E.T."  Apparently, Zaller's colleague was furious with the movie because it represented Hollywood liberals admitting space aliens into the human family.  And yes, it kind of did that.  As Zaller summed up (and here I'm quoting from memory), "Leave it to liberals to admit space aliens into the human family, and leave it to conservatives to be offended by it."

Vuvuzelas

I learn from Jon Bernstein that political bloggers are supposed to have something to say about World Cup soccer.  I really don't have anything here.  I can't believe that the growth of soccer in the U.S. represents either a good or bad thing.  If you want to play, play.  If not, whatever.  I rather enjoy the idea of longtime international adversaries taking out their aggressions on the soccer field, but the matchups rarely seem to work out that way.  I've just never had really strong feelings about Slovenia one way or another.

The one thing I hoped to bring to the table has already been mentioned by Dana at Edge of the American West.  But I'll say it anyway.  If you have an iPhone, go download the free vuvuzela app.  You never know when it might come in handy.  I plan on using it during my kids' soccer games this fall.

Does party predict sports team affiliation?

A few weeks ago I asked whether liberals were more likely than conservatives to root for Butler over Duke in the men's NCAA basketballs finals, given that Butler was clearly the underdog.  Faithful reader BK, who teaches sports marketing at a business school, writes in to say, basically, no:

After spending years in sports marketing, and after kicking the question around with colleagues, we were relieved to conclude (unscientifically) that political ID was an almost undetectable and rarely reliable indicator of fan support. Interestingly, fans of teams may gravitate to a choice of media (CNN vs. Fox), but it may be a function as much of age or other factors than political lean. Other elements that may form a political identification -- geographic considerations, socioeconomics, race -- may influence ticket purchases, but fans just don't like their politics mixing with their fun time. A friend with the St. Louis Blues said they greatly regretted having hockey mom Sarah Palin drop the ceremonial first puck at a game in the fall of 2008. The backlash against the team, not from Democrats, but instead from fans who wanted a break from the political season, was intense - although the ProgressNow "player cards" handed out pre-game were priceless. Same response to the Scott Brown/Martha Coakley/Curt Schilling silliness earlier this year, and to some degree, John Elway's endorsement of John McCain.

Your own musings about the Duke/Butler contest likely confirm your gut suspicions about fans in general.... The good news, from my perspective, is that sports is still largely devoid of the political opinion that occasionally touches film and music stars. Human nature usually forces us to actually unite - on the side of the hometown team and/or the underdog!