The Jetpacker

When we started research on the 2010 Winter Olympics in Vancouver, we noticed that many Canadian media outlets were calling the home nation “favorites” in just about every sport.  Of course, we expect the media to play favorites.

But we hope the referees and judges don’t.  I think we can all agree that as much as we love watching the Olympics, we often become suspicious of the people judging the competitions.  How many times have you watched a sport and thought the host nation was receiving questionably favorable scores?  (Do the 2008 Summer Games in China ring a bell?)

Maybe the judges are consciously or subconsciously influenced by the home crowd.  Maybe the judges from the host nation show bias.  Maybe our national pride clouds our judgment and makes us paranoid.

Or maybe the home athletes feel the pressure to succeed and put on the performance of a lifetime.

That got us thinking about how many times the host nation has won the most medals overall in the Winter Olympics.  So the nerd in us decided to do a little research, and here’s what we found…

Since 1924, there have only been 20 Winter Games.  And out of those 20, the host nation has won the most medals only 4 times. That’s only 20%, which is way less than we thought it would be.

So we dug a little deeper.  We wanted to know how often the host nation showed improvement from their previous Olympic effort.  We figured that even if the host nation didn’t win the most medals, they probably won a lot more than at the prior Olympics.

Check this out…

80% of the time the host nation won MORE medals than they did at the previous Olympics.

But it turns out there isn’t as much disparity as you might think.  Fact is, there wasn’t a significant enough improvement to raise any red flags.

Yes, the host nation won 4.25 more medals than they did at the previous Olympics.  But when you consider that more events are added every year, it’s expected that every nation will likely win more medals.

On average, the host nation placed only 2 spots higher on the overall medal count chart than the previous Olympics.  The largest improvement ever was when France placed 7^th as the home nation in 1992 after finishing 15^th in overall medal count in 1988.

At the 2006 Olympics, the home nation of Italy wound up 9th in overall medals whereas in 2002 they were 7th.  That was only the second time the home nation won less medals than at the previous Olympics (the other was Switzerland in 1928 where they won only one medal after winning 3 at the previous Winter Games).

What we learned from looking at these stats is that sometimes our national pride gets the best of us.  We want the athletes that represent our country to win so bad that we often get paranoid that judges are biased toward the home nation.  Looking at the stats, that’s not the case.  There’s nothing to suggest any foul play.

The Olympics are actually much fairer than the commentators and media would have us believe.

Canada won the third most medals overall at the 2006 Winter Olympics in Torino with 24, only 5 behind Germany’s 29.  So if Canada winds up winning the most medals at the 2010 Winter Games in Vancouver, don’t be suspicious.  It won’t have anything to do with favoritism.  It’ll have everything to do with Canadian athletes striving to be their best in front of the home crowd.