Channel 7's Sunrise program puts up what they call the 'real' medal tally based on population size. At the moment it's:
1 Australia
2 New Zealand
3 Greece
4 Norway

As for that idea of 'buying' gold medals, I am all for champion athletes coming here if it's because this is where they want to live, but we should never go so far as paying them. I was extremely pleased with the result of the womens 5000m yesterday. The favourite was an Ethiopian woman who had been basically bought by a Turkish company to go and compete for Turkey and win them a gold medal. She was the world record holder but after leading early, she collapsed and finished 12th, while the gold medal was won by another Ethiopian. Justice!

As far as I'm concerned, there's no doubt that a larger population gives you more chance of unearthing a champion athlete. The Americans have 280 million people, so they obviously stand a greater chance of producing someone special than we do with our 20 million. They can also have much greater depth across a whole lot of sports.

Out of all the countries involved, the USA would be competitive at the largest number of sports, but we're probably second as far as that is concerned. Take the Baseball for example. We beat Japan to get to the final. Now, Japan has a population about 6 or 7 times ours and Baseball is basically their number one sport, while it's a very minor sport here. Beating Japan at Baseball should be just like Japan beating Australia at Cricket. We'll be playing Cuba in the final, and again they are just so incredibly strong at Baseball, so it's hard to see us winning the gold. Silver would still be a great performance though.


[ This Message was edited by: sportznut on 2004-08-25 09:50 ]