The Olympics are over, but one of Tom’s old friends, Heather Schultz, sent him an interesting way to look at the medal results. It came from John Fawcett, a New Zealander and Shultz’s colleague at Save the Children. John says, “[S]urely a better way to assess the depth and quality of a nation is to take a look at the per-capita medal table, the table that puts medal totals in proportion to population size?” Here’s a pdf of the table. Some of you have been discussing this topic in the comments. Let us know what you think of the table. Erik Hansen raised a point about Iceland winning a silver medal in handball, and that their population is 304,000. As John asked, do you know any Olympic medalists personally?
