Waaah, waaaah, participation medals!

-some conservative fool somewhere

It isn't irrelevant at all, obviously population size is one of the most important variables when it comes to gold medals, another one is availability of winter sports, another is national wealth and investment in sports & athletes.

It's a good thing that Nazi USA didn't top the table. It is a disgrace that Israel was allowed to compete. The IOC is complicit with genocide.

All the countries mentioned in the article that have 10+ times bigger populations, like USA, Canada, Italy Germany, have about equal winter sport opportunities, economies and traditions to Norway.
So it is absolutely an impressive feat by Norway to take home the most gold medals when they are vastly outnumbered by several other countries.
Obviously countries that have no winter sport traditions, and have little or no opportunity for winter sport are not relevant to this comparison.

Yeah, the record we beat was our own, no US in sight.

The winners didn't even try to compete. They were just there by pure accident and wanted to get home again

Noggie, here. I did actually ski to school many times as a kid.

Yea my route to school has a 200m sheer cliff that I fly off of every morning.

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

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

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.

Norway also target sports that have large numbers of available medals that they also have a historic affinity with ie cross country skiing (36 medals total, 14 won), biathlon (33 total, 11 won), ski jump (19 total, 5 won).

Norway is also incredibly wealthy and invests very heavily in its winter Olympic athletes where USA, obviously dramatically richer has to spread its resources across winter Olympics, summer Olympics and a whole host of sports that aren't even in the Olympics.

Of course they do, it falls under the guise of American exceptionalism propaganda

Downhill is very much not cheap. I’d say it’s probably on par with us resorts.

Skiing you can do for mostly free in season though.

Sweden is the big one, while Norway, Denmark and Finland are about the same.