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[–] 24 points 5 months ago (3 children)

If you take Europe as a continent, it beats the USA handily. To make it comparable, the US athletes should be grouped by state. They'd do even worse.

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  • [–] 45 points 5 months ago

    To be fair, Europe gets a bit overrepresented in that regard because it can send loads of athletes as separate countries. To take the men's mass start speed skating final as an example, ten of the sixteen competitors were from the EU, but it would only be allowed to send two as a single country

    On the other hand, Norway alone beat everyone of course, and European countries are eight of the top ten on the medal table

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  • [–] 9 points 5 months ago* (2 children)

    But the US only completed as one country in each discipline while each country in Europe has the chance to earn a medal for 'Europe'. To make it comparable, either

    1. each US state would have needed to field their own team and you average over the number of teams or

    2. EU and the US would have needed to compete with one team each per competition

    that said, Europe is indeed very successful at the Olympics per capita

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  • [–] 6 points 5 months ago*

    If you look at the statistics for medals per country, they’re quite strongly correlated with numbers of athletes sent. This makes sense because a given athlete can only win 1 medal in 1 event and if you don’t send an athlete to an event you have no chance to win a medal.

    This is also the main reason for the host country medal bump: host country’s athletes automatically qualify for a lot of spots in the events. This means they can send more athletes than they otherwise would, so they win more medals than usual.

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