this post was submitted on 22 Feb 2026
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188
Norway (population: 5.7m) beats US (342m) to top Winter Olympics medal table (www.theguardian.com)
submitted 9 hours ago by NomNom@feddit.uk to c/europe@feddit.org
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[โ€“] Ontimp@feddit.org 4 points 8 hours ago (2 children)

It would be interesting to actually do the math regarding how much of a predictor population size is.

I'd guess that beyond a relatively low saturation level of a few millions you get enough people with raw talent in each given population that the other factors you listed (funding, methods, support structures, etc.) make the actual difference

[โ€“] Denjin@feddit.uk 5 points 6 hours ago

According to this study: https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/ssqu.13436

Population size is of second tier importance behind economic factors, and the effect isn't linear, but an "inverted u" where tiny nations suffer, mid-size to larger nations do better but very large countries fall off due to lack of resources to continually scale investment into ever larger talent pools.

The winter Olympics throws the economic needs of elite sport into sharp focus because unlike athletics, most winter sports require more money for equipment, facilities, training etc to develop high end athletes, poorer countries punch above their weight in things like long-distance running where it's relatively cheap to train an athlete compared to alpine skiing or ice hockey. Hence why the winter Olympics is dominated by wealthy countries almost all of which are either in Europe, North America or China/Korea/Japan.

The only outliers to that are Brazil who had a downhill skier who competed his whole career for Norway before retiring and deciding to compete again under a different flag and Kazakhstan who (no disrespect to his performance) won because the favourites all unexpectedly messed up.

[โ€“] bearboiblake@pawb.social 0 points 7 hours ago (1 children)

I don't think so, really. Professional athletes sometimes have rare mutations which give them an advantage in their sport. More population is always going to yield more potential. Investment is obviously critical too, but investment also scales with population size, so you could say it's a second-order effect somewhat.

[โ€“] Ontimp@feddit.org 3 points 6 hours ago* (last edited 5 hours ago)

But consider this:

Let's say the raw talent in e.g. Skeleton bob are normally distributed around the world.

So of the top 10000 most talented people in Skeleton, about 1700 of those would be born in China, about 6 in Norway - a factor of about 280x difference.

So to offset the 'natural talent' disadvantage of low population size, Norway would need to be 280x more effective in discovering the talent available in their population than China.

And I think that's pretty reasonable to suppose; consider e.g. likelihood of being exposed to a highly specific winter sport in your youth, likelihood of living in a geographical area where talent could show itself (i.e. the mountains), likelihood your family has the material means to support a niche winter sport in the first place until you are discovered, etc.

By my rough estimate, any of these likelihoods are way higher for any given Norwegian child due to cultural, socio-economic and other structural factors.

So while e.g. China might have the greater raw pool of talent in Skeleton compared to Norway, at the end of the day, Norway probably offsets this through better talent discovery in this niche discipline. So the raw talent of the roster of people walking into the Olympic training camps is likely pretty comparable.

(Note that this argument is not about China, Norway, or Skeleton specifically but about nieces and structural filters in talent discovery. In a discipline like 200m free style swimming where China has massive discovery potential the numbers of course weigh considerably heavier)