By Damon Poeter, Deputy Lifestyles Editor
Australia is the most athletic nation in the world and India the
least. At least that’s what a recent story in the Atlantic Monthly
magazine contends. But is it really fair to say this?
By Damon Poeter, Deputy Lifestyles Editor
Australia is the most athletic nation in the world and India the least. At least that’s what a recent story in the Atlantic Monthly magazine contends. But is it really fair to say this?
Using simple math, Nathan Littlefield tallied the medal counts from the 1996 and 2000 Olympic Games of participating nations, then measured them against population size. “If all nations were equally athletic,” he writes, “each would win a share of medals proportional to its share of world population.”
The U.S., it turns out, does fairly well by this measure, earning 2.5 times the medals it would be expected to based on its population. But Australia is the real superstar, earning a whopping 18.2 times the medals it would earn if it was just average athletically.
India, meanwhile, is the worst of the worst, according to Littlefield. Nearly a billion people living in the South Asian country could only manage two medals in Atlanta and Sydney for a medals earned to population ratio of less than 1 percent.
But as H. L. Mencken famously said, “For every complex problem, there is a solution that is simple, neat, and wrong.” And for all the elegant simplicity of Littlefield’s methodology, it probably falls into that category. For one thing, he makes no distinction between rich countries with the resources to develop athletes and poor countries without them. For another, the individual sports included in the Olympics favor some countries over others. Millions in Southeast Asia play a very skillful sport called sepak takraw that is sort of like volleyball … only instead of using their hands, players use their feet to get the ball over the net. Synchronized diving, a sport where the medals handed out number just slightly less than the humans on the planet who actually participate in the activity, is an Olympic event. Sepak tekraw isn’t.
And what about cricket? India’s multitudes live and die with the fortunes of their national cricket team. Isn’t it time to make it an Olympic sport? True, India finished second to Australia in the last Cricket World Cup … but that second-place finish shows the two countries are a lot closer in athletic ability than first and last.
