Source: The Wall Street Journal
Back in early 2000, Daniel Johnson, a professor at Colorado College, found himself with extra funding leftover from a separate project and with the help of an undergrad decided to use the resources to see whether economic variables could predict the medal winnings of each country in the upcoming summer Olympics.
“We were shocked at how accurate our predictions were,” he said. His model used five basic pieces of data for each participating nation: GDP per capita, total population, political structure (democratic, authoritarian, military or communist), climate (the number of frost days) and home-nation bias. “It’s a pretty simple model,” Mr. Johnson said.
His results and subsequent predictions weren’t too well-publicized — it was, after all, an exploratory project. But once the Games concluded and countries’ medal count showed a 95-96% correlation to his predictions (“We were so accurate we thought we’d made a mistake,” he says), people started to pay attention. Calls poured in, including calls from two nations “who shall remain nameless” asking him for advice to gear up for the next Games.
“It would be harmful for me to offer advice,” the self-proclaimed un-athletic professor jokes. “I don’t know, get more income per capita?”
For each summer and winter Olympics since 2000, Mr. Johnson’s medal count predictions have been remarkably accurate. And now, ahead of the Aug. 8 start to this summer’s Olympics in Beijing, Mr. Johnson has released his latest estimates. (Read about his 2006 predictions.)
The U.S. is expected to match its 2004 Athens medal count with a total of 103, though slip slightly to 33 gold medals from 35. Russia is predicted to finish second overall with 95 medals (and 28 golds).
But the big story this year is China, the host nation, expected to take home 89 total medals and a whopping 44 golds. The country could even beat the U.S. to become the top medal-earner overall, Mr. Johnson says. “China we badly underestimated in Athens and we could still be underestimating,” he said, adding that China’s expected 44 golds would match the U.S. tally when it hosted the 1996 Olympics in Atlanta, Ga.
Typically, host nations’ medal count is boosted by about 25 from its baseline performance, and China took home 32 golds in Athens. Plus, its GDP per capita has soared since the last Games. Adding to the posturing is that China is expected to be pushing quite hard for success in the Games as a testament to its arrival as a global superpower.
Mr. Johnson says what matters most isn’t comparing the take-home medal count of one nation compared to another but instead measuring it against the nation’s own expected performance, based on his metrics. “This is more of a benchmarking analysis than anything else,” he said, to gauge which nations are over- or under-performing their expected totals. Plus, the overall tally is obviously influenced by the size of each nation and how many athletes they train and send to the games. “One reason Botswana doesn’t win a lot of medals is they don’t send a lot of participants each year,” he said.
Of course, Mr. Johnson isn’t the only economist who aims to predict the outcome of the Games. Last week, PricewaterhouseCoopers released a study that predicts China will take the top spot, estimating that the host nation will win 88 medals, followed by the U.S. with 87 and Russia with 79.