The Pietist Schoolman

8/5/16: If you came to this post, you might want to see this morning’s update, which folds in the results from 2012 London and corrects a couple of spreadsheet errors.

It’s a good thing the Olympics are wrapping up this week. If they continued much longer, I wouldn’t get any pre-semester work done!

Not just because I’m watching so much of NBC’s Olympic coverage that I’m worried that I’ll grade my students like Tim Daggett evaluates gymnastics: “Oh, that’s disastrous! A full point off!!” But because it keeps raising questions that I really shouldn’t take the time to answer…

Like this one that occurred to me while watching Jamaicans win two more 100m dashes over the weekend: Which countries are most dominant in each sport?

Even to a casual observer, it seems obvious that Chinese athletes dominate several sports that most Americans tend to view as best left in basements and backyards: ping pong, badminton, diving… But is that actually true? And what about other sports that don’t seem quite so dominated by a single nation’s athletes? (And not just gold medals, but silver and bronze as well.)

Now, even an academic like myself only has so much time to waste in August, so I limited myself: no Winter sports, and only completed Summer Olympics from the current century. So here’s the list: which countries have done the best in each sport in the 2000, 2004, and 2008 Summer Olympics? (I gave three points for each gold, two for silver, and one for bronze, then computed the percentage of available “medal-points” won. I’m sure I missed a few here or there, so I rounded the percentages rather than going to tenths or thousandths…)

We’ll start with sports in which the majority of points went to one country:

Sport	Dominant Country	Percentage of Points
Table Tennis	China	68%
Diving	China	51%
Badminton	China	51%

So far so unsurprising. Now for sports in which countries other than China lap the field, though the dominance isn’t quite so marked:

Sport	Dominant Country	Percentage of Points
Archery	South Korea	47%
Basketball	USA	44%
Baseball & Softball	USA	33%
Swimming	USA	31%
Field Hockey	The Netherlands	31%
Volleyball	Brazil	31%

Of these, American preeminence in swimming seems most impressive (Australia comes second in the sport, at 17%), simply because there are so many more swimming medals to be won than in the other sports on this list (nearly nine times as many as in archery, the next highest). And the American share would be even greater if I hadn’t lumped in synchronized with the races, since the USA had earned only three bronze medals in that sport in Summer Olympics of the 2000s coming into London.(And Sports Illustrated doesn’t project the Americans to win any more this year.)

Now to sports in which the highest-achieving country (“dominant” no longer seems like the right adjective) has earned 20-29% of my “medal-points”:

Sport	Dominant Country	Percentage of Points
Equestrian	Germany	26%
Water Polo	Hungary	26%
Modern Pentathlon	Russia	25%
Weightlifting	China	25%
Wrestling	Russia	22%
Judo	Japan	21%
Fencing	Italy	21%
Taekwondo	South Korea	20%
Gymnastics	Russia	20%

It’s not surprising that these sports are more balanced, with most awarding more than two dozen medals per games. And even the two team sports here that offer only two golds (one for women, one for men) each Olympiad are fairly competitive: in modern pentathlon, the Russians have to compete with the British (19%), Hungarians (13%), and Lithuanians (13%); in water polo, Hungary has to reckon with the USA (20%), Australia (11%), and Serbia (11%).

And then the other, most highly competitive sports:

Sport	Dominant Country	Percentage of Points
Boxing	Cuba	19%
Sailing	Great Britain	19%
Shooting	China	19%
Canoeing/Kayaking	Germany	19%
Tennis	USA	18%
Team Handball	Denmark, Russia	17%
Track and Field	USA	16%
Cycling	Great Britain	15%
Triathlon	Canada, Germany, Switzerland	14%
Rowing	Great Britain	11%

Track and field is, of course, the biggest meet at the Summer Olympics, with medals awarded in over forty separate competitions each games. So the USA winning one-sixth of the available points is impressive, all the more so since Russia is the only other country to earn more than 10% of the points in what the Olympics calls “Athletics” (12% for the Russians). Kenya (7%), Ethiopia (6%), and Jamaica (6%) fill out the top five, with the two East African countries dominating distance races and the Jamaicans starring in sprints.

Kenya and Ethiopia’s achievements in track are rare examples of African dominance. The only other countries from that continent to garner even 5% of available points in any sport are Cameroon and Nigeria, both in soccer (8% and 6%, respectively).

And that suggests one more question… Which continents dominate which sports?

Continent	Sports in which it dominates
Africa	None
Americas	Baseball & Softball (53%), Basketball (58%), Soccer (61%), Volleyball (61%)
Asia & Oceania	Archery (71%), Badminton (91%), Diving (63%), Judo (50%),  Table Tennis (92%), Taekwondo (55%), Weightlifting (56%)
Europe	Athletics (44%), Boxing (40%), Canoeing & Kayaking (85%), Cycling (74%), Equestrian (65%), Fencing (79%), Field Hockey (56%), Gymnastics (58%), Handball (92%), Modern Pentathlon (94%), Rowing (75%), Sailing (64%), Shooting (58%), Swimming (36%), Tennis (54%), Triathlon (44%), Water Polo (69%), Wrestling (42%)

(I’m following the UN’s definition of world regions, so Russia goes with Europe rather than Asia.)

Swimming comes off as the most geographically balanced competition, with Europe just edging the Americas (33%, though that’s almost all USA) and Asia (26%, though that’s only that high because I’m including Australia). Even Africa gets nearly 5% of the points in swimming (thanks mostly to the most famous athlete from Zimbabwe), which is that continent’s third highest share (track and field, 19%; soccer, 14%).

Looking at that chart, it’s hard for this Minnesota Twins fan not to view the IOC’s decision to take baseball off the London schedule with anything but cynicism. It’s hard to know exactly why baseball and softball were voted out in 2008, since the ballot is secret, and IOC members aren’t expected to explain their votes. In addition to the non-participation of major league baseball players, the dominance of the sport by a relative handful of nations (the USA, Cuba, Japan, Australia, and South Korea won all medals in those sports from 2000-2008) is usually suggested as a reason. But knowing that the IOC’s president, two of its four vice-presidents, and four of the nine other members of its executive board come from Europe, it seems fair to point out that Europeans have won more than the Americans/Cubans’ share of baseball/softball points in thirteen sports, with modern pentathlon and team handball seeming especially uncompetitive from an intercontinental point of view.