Specialisation and Olympic medals

When a country finishes on top of the Winter Olympic medal table you immediately think it must be the best nation for winter sports. But a more detailed look at the medal table from Beijing 2022 shows a story of specialisation, with big gains to be made by specialising in sports that offer lots of medals.

The graph below shows the top six countries for gold medals overall, with gold medals broken down by category of sport. In this case I’ve broken them down into alpine (downhill skiing, slalom etc), driving (bobsleigh, luge etc), indoor ice (skating, curling and hockey), neo-ski (freestyle skiing, snowcross etc), and nordic (cross-country, biathlon, ski jumping).

Just from a glance it is easy to see how each country in the top six, with the exception of Sweden, won the majority of medals in one to two categories. The most obvious is the Netherlands who won all their medals in speed-skating, while Norway who finished top of the overall table won 13 of their 15 gold medals in nordic sports.

Also, where would Germany be without bobsleigh, luge and skeleton? They won 9 of the 10 gold medals available and these account for three-quarters of all their gold medals.

The biggest winners from the shift to new sports such as Aerials, Halfpipe, Snowboard Cross, and Big Air are the US and China – both of whom got between 55%-65% of their gold medals from this category. However, this neo-ski has also opened up new opportunities for countries such as New Zealand and Australia to start claiming gold medals (New Zealand got two and Australia one).

The opposite of this trend is in the alpine category, where every gold medal was won by a European. It remains to be see how much longer these events will be considered the Blue Riband of winter sports.

The advent of newer sports in skiing and on ice has increased the range of the Winter Olympics beyond traditional heartlands in Europe and North America. This can only be good for the Games, as a more diverse sporting population (who are genuinely competitive) can only serve to push these sports forwards to faster, higher, stronger things.