Photos courtesy of Amazing Travel Photos
If you Google “Olympics medal count” you’ll see which teams have won medals in the 2012 Olympic Games, ranked by the number of gold medals won. I found this page on Wikipedia: 2012 Summer Olympics medal table
Right now China is leading with 36 gold, 22, silver, 19 bronze and 77 total. The U.S. is second in gold medal count and Great Britain is third.
But China and the United States are big countries with huge populations. China has over 1.3 billion and the U.S. has over 300 million. How can smaller countries compete and win medals in the number of sports that China and the U.S. are able to compete in?
The only fair was is to rank countries by the number of medals won per capita.
I looked up the population of all the medal-winning countries on Wikipedia: List of countries by population Then I set up a spreadsheet to divide the medal count by population.
China has 1 gold medal per 37.4 million people and total medals of 1 per 17,5 million.
The U.S. has 1 gold per 9.2 million people and 1 total medal per 3.9 million people.
Great Britain has 1 gold per 2.8 million and 1 total medal per 1.3 million.
Of the top three medal winners, Great Britain has the most medals per capita.
So of all the medal-winning countries, which country is leading the pack on a medals per capita basis?
Tiny Granada, with a population of only 105,000 has one gold medal. Kirani James won th gold medal for the 400-meter run. His time was under 44 seconds. He is 19 years old.
See 2012 Olympics: Teenage Gold Medalist Kirani James Opens New Era for 400 Meters
