Who’s shaping up to win big?

After playing around with our Olympic medal cartogram (mentioned in this previous post), here are a few interesting observations we’ve come up with:

1. Despite its large population, the UK seems to be punching above its weight compared to most countries
2. The leaders (China and the US) are only slightly inflated when looking at total medals, and appear to be under-achieving when we consider the pool they have to pull from
3. Despite their massive population size, India (pop. 1.2 billion) and Indonesia (pop. 242 million) are doing very poorly, especially compared to Slovenia (pop. 2.0 million), and New Zealand (pop. 4.4 million), who are massively overcompensating for their smaller populations!
4. Countries like Australia and Japan are pretty much ‘on par’ with their medal achievements
5. *Jamaica and North Korea are dwarfing big hitters like Spain and Brazil.
6. *When population is taken into account, China’s 1.3 billion people are slimmed down against New Zealand and Sweden, who perform well despite their small numbers.

We’ll keep adding to the list as things progress…

* From The Telegraph article.