With the TV and newspapers constantly referencing medal counts, I thought it would be interesting to come up with a good measure of how well each country performed. The problem with medal counts is that it gives an advantage to large countries that enter a number of athletes. I am much more impressed when a small or poor country enters a couple athletes who perform better than expected than I am by professional athletes from larger countries. One way create a combined score would be to give 3 points for gold, 2 for silver, 1 for bronze, then add the points up by country and divide by the number of athletes from that country. A better way would be something like:

Where:
n == number of athletes in an event
a_p == the finishing rank of an athlete (1 = gold)
a == the number of athletes a nation entered in an event
s == all events
c_a == the number of events a nation entered

This will give an average score for each country, compensating for some countries entering more athletes. While watching a couple events, I started scraping the results from the Vancouver 2010 website. This took a longer than expected, so I never got around to doing the calculations. Since I haven’t seen the results posted as nice clean CSV files anywhere, I’ll post them for others to use. I ran out of time before including the results for curling and hockey.

Now, if only the Olympics would go back to being amateurs only…

Files:

• 2010 Winter Olympics results spreadsheets (does not include hockey and curling)