China’s total is a lot less impressive per capita of course, since they have at least four times the population of the U.S. ... that lets in the comparison of each other nation’s medal total on a per capita basis. On that basis, countries like Australia and Canada probably finished either close to or above the U.S., then how about Jamaica, with a population about 1 per cent of the USA, winning quite a few track medals.
These total medals per country are always presented as being meaningful but without some sort of scaling factor they are meaningless, one would expect Brazil to do better than Uruguay for example. France is going to come out higher than Denmark. It doesn’t mean those are “better” sporting countries. In fact it probably doesn’t mean anything at all.
Congrats to the individuals who won Olympic medals wherever they call home. I watch it more from the point of view of a chance to see top athletic competition, the country stuff is a bit of a bore frankly. The fact that Canada now has the Olympic 200 meter champion does not mean that most of us can run 200 meters faster than you can. I don’t know if we can or not, nor do I care really.
I looked it up, the actual winner on a per capita basis was San Marino (3 medals, one per 11,310 population).
If you only look at “real” countries with significant populations, then it’s New Zealand and Jamaica doing the best.
The USA was 59th on this list.
I’m not entirely sure this would be the best framework but it’s hard to say how to balance the population factor, I mean let’s compare Canada (36th) and the USA, these are probably close to being equal so that the square root of population would come closer to being a good test.
Also if you’ve finished ahead of all countries with larger populations, that establishes a sort of chain of superior Olympic countries. That chain looks like this as all these countries finished higher per capita than any nation with larger populations:
1. San Marino
2. Bermuda
3. Grenada
4. Bahamas
5. New Zealand
5. Netherlands (9th)
6. Australia (14th)
7. Great Britain (26th)
8. France (40th)
9. Russia (41st)
10. USA (59th)
11. China (78th)
So these were the only nations who beat all larger than themselves, China of course has to be in the list. The only way for the USA to avoid the list is to finish below China and India as the fourth highest population goes to Indonesia which finished 91st of 93 (India 93rd, Nigeria 92nd).