The 2013 Olympics

Describing the scale of organising the Olympics in 2012, Sebastian Coe described it as staging in “19 days…26 simultaneous world championships”. [1]

Fans of huge sporting spectacles dread even numbered years. No Olympics, summer, winter or youth; no World Cup. But as each organising body retreats back from Olympic mania for three years, the odd numbered years are chosen by many for their World Championships, be they biennial or annual. They might take place in unglamorous locations away from the TV cameras, in front of crowds of hundreds, not tens of thousands, but for most sports they are second only to the Olympic competition, with all the sport’s stars present.

So taking Coe’s ’26 simultaneous world championships’, if we take the results of all the championships in one year, it’s a chance to compare this year’s results with last year. With many countries basing their funding, targets and ambitions solely round Olympic results (usually for political capital or matters of soft power), this gives us a clue to the question: who pushes everything to overperform at the Olympics, who underperformed in London, and who maintains a consistent quality?

Firstly, some pesky data hitches:

·         Not all Olympic events took place in a World Championship in 2013. Volleyball, basketball, hockey and equestrian did not hold equivalent competitions at all; boxing, gymnastics, football, shooting, sailing and table tennis did not hold competitions in some events; tennis does not hold any equivalent championships to the Olympic doubles competitions, which require both team members to be of the same nationality (nb, in the absence of an official World Championships, as the closest equivalent to the grass courts at London 2012, Wimbledon 2013 is taken as the equivalent competition), and FIFA doesn’t organise anything quite like the messy compromise that is the Olympic men’s football tournament (for the purposes of this, I’ve used the closest tournament from 2013, the u-20 world cup). If we remove these events from the 2012 medal table, there are 31 fewer events (and therefore gold medals), and the table looks like this:

2012 medal table (adjusted)

·         World Championship entry rules are not always the same as the Olympic rules. For example, taekwondo and women’s boxing have different weight categories, which affect the range of entrants; the sailing discipline world championships allow more than one entrant from each nation, unlike at the Olympics; and the field of competitors in archery is well over double the number of Olympic entrants. This can also affect country entrants: xxx, the 52kg women’s judo champion, is able to represent Kosovo at the World Championships, but Albania at the Olympics as Kosovo has no recognised NOC. In these instances, I consider that the skew effect is either small or unmanageable, and so make no alterations to the World Championship results in comparison.

So, who wins? It is long speculated that former Eastern bloc and Communist countries, especially modern China, have long understood the political capital of Olympic success – having the whole world watch your athletes dominate the field, seeing your flag at the top of the medal table. These are only exacerbated by reports of their ‘tortuous’ training camps. ([2] [3]) Thinking of the former Eastern Bloc, we even begin to touch on the world of doping – how much did East Germany value the ability to trounce their capitalist rivals on the medal table?

And the numbers, I’m afraid, don’t entirely agree with this theory:

2013 Olympic medal table

To get a really fair comparison, we should also bring in the year before the Olympics, and it tells a similar story in most cases. Taking an average of the difference between gold and overall medals won in the ‘2011’ and ‘2013 Olympics’ compared to the actual results (adjusted due to reductions in the 2013 data) by country, and comparing this back against the actual results, gives us a quotient to show how much each country raised its game for the Games – or underperformed compared to the (slightly) less pressurised World Championships either side of the Games. Including only countries which won more than 10 medals in the (adjusted) 2012 table, the results look like this:

2012 Olympics: game-raisers and underperformers

Firstly, this confirms the general idea of the host bias – not only are the athletes competing in a more favourable environment, but the national body will increase expectations (and hopefully funding) for its athletes with the intention of peaking during the Games. You can even see Brazil at the bottom, apparently ramping its efforts up in World Championships to come 10^th in the 2013 table, but not replicating this at 2012. This host bias doesn’t necessarily hold for the World Championships – Spain and Russia hosted the big hitting Championships in swimming and athletics, without a noticeable bump in those events. Kazakhstan achieved one in its hosting of the boxing World Championships, but not enough to counteract their big Olympic wins in weightlifting.

Ukraine, Kazakhstan, Cuba, Hungary and China are all former or current Communist countries which understand the soft power effects of Olympic success, while the United States, as the Cold War enemy, has the same appreciation and historical value placed on Olympic over World Championship success. Of those who underperformed, it is dominated by ‘Western’ countries from Canada to New Zealand via Western Europe who maintain a consistent level of interest and success in sport regardless of the stage, and some of whom had disappointing Olympics. See also Kenya, who notably underperformed in 2012; while Russia and Korea are more surprising results which may be down to sporting chance.

Also consider elasticity of chance, of course. Some sports have a wide open field, when we look at countries. Although the actual champions may change, Korea dominates archery, and Russia synchronised swimming; and while it would be hard to argue that Kazakhstan’s gold medal in road race cycling (who produced Vinokourov, the men’s road race gold medallist) is something that you’d expect repeated, it certainly contributes to their Olympic peak. But this is a large sample size, and there are some very striking changes, consistent with years before and after.

This is a results (not funding) based method of examining the relative importance placed on the Olympics in each country; there could be many other sources for comparison beyond world championships – for instance, comparing with the World Games, which includes some of the sports on the rungs below the Olympics, shows the European consistency in achievement across all sports, regardless of profile. There could be equally as many interpretations of the results, from the importance each country places on the Games, to the inconstancy of sport.

Right on

Six months on from the London Games, and sports media has reverted to type. Despite a brief flirtation with more sports than ever before, most nations have settled back into their usual diet - in most cases, football, football and football. Athletes who had their moment in front of a global audience are back to competing in front of small gatherings - if at all.

This is hardly unexpected, but in the UK at least has been particularly harsh on two (large) groups of athletes. Disability sports have been put through the ringer by Oscar Pistorius and, despite some successes, there have been mixed results since the Paralympics. And on International Women's Day, attention has once again turned to the lower profile of women in sport.

Sportswomen are paid less and less supported than their male colleagues, and the gender gap in major sports is infinitesimally larger than in most walks of life - while male footballers can pockets hundreds of thousands of pounds per week, women are only just able to join the PFA. Women's sport is rarely broadcast, and hardly ever on major channels at prime time. The status quo of sport merely serves to cast the Olympics as halcyon period of unattainable equality. So it seems an appropriate time to take stock: how equal are the Olympics?

Taking the roster of sports and events at London 2012, the scorecard looks like this:

(NB: 'Equal medals': the same number of medals are available for male and female competitors
'Equal events': no sporting concessions are made for female competitors, e.g., shorter distances / time / smaller teams)

The results aren't bad. Sixteen sports are either open, women-only, or offer the same medals for the same events; some of the others make only very minor concessions (e.g., the men's tennis final is 5 sets, the women's 3; swimming distances are identical with the exception of the 800m for women and 1500m for men; the cycling team pursuit is for teams for 4 men but 3 women). There are no entirely men only sports, with women's boxing having been introduced in 2012, although there do remain a number of men only events in athletics, canoeing, gymnastics, rowing, sailing, shooting and wrestling.

Beyond boxing, however, long-term Olympic watchers will have noted a number of significant changes in recent Games. Track cycling only began offering equal numbers of medals in 2012, and fencing in 2008. The stubbornly unbalanced events such as athletics, wrestling, shooting and canoeing have made changes to redress the balance, although the narrowly unbalanced rowing programme is unchanged since 1976.

What really stands out when looking at past Games is how much change has happened how recently. In 1976, 21% of athletes were female, and 26% of events were for women. In 2012, this was 44% and 45%. The following chart shows just how sharply these proportions have risen over the history of the summer Olympics:

Note the large gap between the percentage of events for women and percentage of female athletes between 1952 and 1992 in particular, which peaked at 9ppt in 1968. Evenn though the proportions remained low, governing bodies were actively driving the increased participation of women by increasing the number of events, even if the number of athletes didn't match their enthusiasm to stage the competitions, or the competitions were deliberately been restricted in size. Since 1992 this gap has been narrower and narrower, to almost 0 in 2012. So even though the total numbers remain short of 50%, and the rate of increase has slowed overall, supply is matching demand. If the IOC is really committed to pushing for equal representation, the hunger is there - create 50% of events for women, and the proportion of female athletes won't be far behind.

While this is all well and good for 16 days every two weeks, it only serves to highlight the disparity with the  reality of sporting inequality. But the appetite for consumption is quite apparently there - the industry of sport, the broadcasters, commercial partners and governing bodies needs to meet that appetite.

Games without frontiers

Which is the most international sport?

At the Olympics we have an opportunity not only to see the world compete with itself at sport, but to see sports vie for attention against each other. In 2004 I was living in China - I could name all the world's greatest badminton and table tennis stars, and saw not a single second of the equestrian competition. In Croatia in the run-up to the 2012 Games, I might have thought from the TV promotion that handball and water polo were the only sports being contested, while at the Deutsches Haus the importance of dressage to the German audience hit home. Even with every minute of every sport being broadcast live in London, it was rare to stumble across at least half of the contests - some friends found it hard to accept that China was going toe to toe with the US, as their successes were in sports little celebrated by the main coverage. Every region has a natural attention bias, just as every sport - even football - has a heartland of support. Every sport at the Olympics is international, but some are without doubt more international than others.

The Olympics, then, gives us an opportunity to ask a different question - which is the most globalised sport? 

Which sport has the active attention and participation of the most countries, with the most equal spread of success? Football may be global, but the chances of a World Cup winner coming from Asia, North America, or even Africa are slim. Cricket on the other hand, is competed with broadly even chances across continents, despite the small number of countries. The entire world runs, but it is now fairly rare to find sprint winners from outside the Caribbean and North America, or to find distance winners from beyond East Africa. Indeed, at what point do sports that are little more than basic uncodified elements of human survival - running, swimming, fighting, even hunting, fishing, dancing even become 'sport'?

We are dealing with a pre-selected sample. The IOC already has the largely thankless task of managing the sports and discipline of the Olympic programme, not to mention the federations. In 2012 there were 26 sports, with two joining in 2016, eight competing for accession in 2020, and 25 more 'recognised' and eligible for future accession. To be 'recognised' is to meet the basic requirements of 'international sport' - they are played widely and competed by a large number of nations around the world; to be competed at the Olympics is the highest achievement of being considered international. They should not appear insular in amongst the Olympic schedule - despite the mass of cricket fans, the few number of countries they follow would make it appear so. An Olympic cricket competition (at the current state of the game) would be competed by a small number of similar countries, and might struggle to attract the world's greatest players - the same reasons that baseball and softball were dropped.

So which sports attract the greatest representation?

Most and least represented sports at the 2012 Summer Olympics (percent of total NOCs with representation)

Measure of participation is, in many ways, predetermined by the governing federation, but it is a fair assumption that, with few exceptions where the federations are deliberate in trying to stem a country's dominance (table tennis, track cycling, more later), the representation criteria are a fair reflection of world competition: the Olympic hierarchy which influences it is long established.

This is misleading, however. 

Some disciplines, particularly those with weight classes and individual competitors (judo, boxing), will naturally attract and encourage wider representation; others, particularly team sports with complex round robin competitions and one winner for each gender, will naturally have fewer. With athletics, too, we must consider that, as the tournament showcase, many countries which have otherwise failed to qualify athletes choose to enter their wildcards into the men's 100m, thus inflating its participation (only Aruba, Bhutan, Luxembourg and Nauru entered no athletes). That said, everyone runs - certainly more people run than row - so as an indicator of the line between action and sport, more than as the Olympic showcase event, perhaps it's only apt that it has the highest representation.


We can see that breadth of engagement is no indication of being internationally competed. Several sports are dominated by individual countries, regardless of the number of countries competing. 57 competed in table tennis, but China won every gold; in archery too, 45 countries entered, but Korea won all but one gold (and that one was a shock). Conversely, few in the big-two medal team events were there to make up the numbers. Even swimming, despite being the sport with the second highest number of participating countries, had nearly half the gold medals won by one country (the US). In fact, only nine countries won golds in the pool (or the Serpentine), meaning that each gold winning country won an average of c.4 golds each - only fewer than for badminton and table tennis, which were whitewashed by China. It tops the chart for the equivalent number for all medal colours. Despite the wide range of representation (166 countries in 2012) and large number of medals available, swimming success is dominated by a small number of countries, and the US in particular.



This can also apply to regions. In an effort to stop British dominance in the velodrome, countries were limited to one entrant per event. In the end, 7 of the 10 gold medals went to Britain - but 9 out of 10 went to Western European nations, and the other to Australia; hardly global success for a global sport. If all countries are encouraged to enter token athletes, but every medal goes to athletes from Western Europe, it can be hardly be considered globalised; indeed, it could almost be considered a failing of the federation in using selection criteria which are untrue to the realities of the global state of play. Better, surely, to have fewer countries represented, and a higher level of competition?

NOC success by sport - percent of total NOCs represented, winning medals and winning gold; listed by percent of competing NOCs winning gold (top four and bottom four only shown)

I propose, therefore, a measure of globalisation, calculated on just the basis not of participation, but also on the results of an individual competition; in this case, the competitions at the 2012 summer Games. It is calculated using the statistics above, amongst others; sports achieve a higher index score for athletes from a greater number of countries represented; but this is tempered if certain countries, regions or continents are dominant. In a test scenario, in which every country enters an equal number of athletes, and every region and continent wins an equal number of medals and gold medals, the highest index score is roughly 100. (This is, of course, extremely unlikely) The results look like this:

It should be little surprise that athletics and swimming are two of the most 'globalised', with the greatest number of medals available and athletes competing. The nature of the competitions - short, multi-participatory races - encourages mass representation. However, this is not true amongst other racing sports (shown in blue) with multiple medals: canoe sprint, for instance, scores low thanks to its consistent domination by European countries. The knockout martial arts in purple - boxing, judo etc. - also achieve a universality of form combined with an encouragingly global format. They score consistently high on the index - even fairly Eurocentric fencing, which has relatively strong success in Asia and the Americas, scores well.

On the other hand, the grey bars are all the large team sports with two medals available, which require a lot of complex competition for comparatively few results (one winning women's team and one winning men's team). The score will fluctuate greatly depending on relatively small throws of the dice - even with the water polo winners coming from different continents, the extent of European dominance throughout the fairly small competition comes through in its low score.

We can see that the format alone is no barrier to being a global sport - even in its neutered Olympic format, far smaller than other Olympic sports, football remains one of the most global presences. In fact, you can see below, in comparison with the 2010 and 2011 FIFA World Cups, that the Olympic competition is in fact more global in terms of representation and performance than the (admittedly wider watched) FIFA competitions. The tennis competition, too, with deliberately reduced numbers of players from the dominant countries, is more global in its Olympic form than at Wimbledon. Who says they don't belong at the world's Games?

New sports

Eight sports are competing for inclusion in 2020; rugby sevens and golf are joining in 2016. How might they compare in amongst the current Olympic competition? I've used what is probably the fairest comparison - the competitions at the 2009 World Games, where a number of non-Olympic sports compete in quasi-Olympic formats. Wushu and baseball / softball (which may compete under one banner, and so are shown as such) were showcased and competed respectively at Beijing 2008, so those competitions are used (Macauans are assumed to represent China); and beach soccer, which is not competed at the World Games either, is represented by the most recent World Cup (NB, there is no women's competition, and Tahitian players are assumed to represent France). For golf and rugby sevens, the 2012 Opens and London Sevens have been used, as they appear to be closest in format and representation to the 2016 competitions at this stage.



Karate, it seems, should have IOC members' votes if they are concerned about the global nature of the sport alone. It has a very similar profile to other martial arts, with a large number of medals and wide breadth of countries competing at even levels. It does remain significantly behind taekwondo and judo, but would be one of the most 'global' sports at the Games, more so than fencing. Wushu, on the other hand, suffers from dominance by China and East Asia. Nevertheless, with space for another Asian martial art, and the leading Korean and Japanese martial arts already represented, wushu may be perceived as a chance to offer a more global programme as a whole.

Racquet sports, on the other hand, are very well represented already, although every Olympics is accompanied by grumblings about tennis's place. While the ATP has succeeded in raising the profile of Olympic tennis, it remains a hugely popular global sport with fairly localised centres of excellence - the US and Eastern Europe for women, Western Europe for men. And so squash, it seems, would be a better bet for a 'global' Games in 2020 - if there is considered room for another racquet sport.

Baseball and softball are expected to put up a strong campaign for reinclusion; the bases of their exclusion were founded on its narrow geographic appeal, compounded by a lack of elite participation. Despite the work that has been done to address these concerns since 2005, this is borne out by its index from the 2008 competition. With IOC delegates likely to be voting not just on including new sports for 2020, but also the status of existing sports, these results probably cement the fears that modern pentathlon could have its Olympic days numbered, but it is water polo that must really question its global nature, despite the depth of support in central and eastern Europe.

Appendix:

A final comparison to cheer the hearts of the IOC members. The total score for the 2012 Olympic Games as a whole is a little above the athletics competition's score at 33. An equivalent score for the other great global body of world peace and harmony, the UN? 29.

(Awarding a gold medal for each year as a permanent member of the security council, and a medal for each year on the council)

Team EU

The stage is set. The pillars of industry have scythed through the rural idyll, Mary Poppins, Mr Bean, Frankie and Tim have remastered recent British history. To the pumping sound of Underworld, 180 teams parade through the Olympic stadium before a collective roar goes round - the host team is entering the stadium. In shimmering deep blue Stella McCartney jackets, local hero Chris Hoy waves the twelve stars in front of a legion of beaming athletes, themselves led (as a compromise for tradition) by the small group of Greek athletes. The flag is planted in the replica Tor; Mr Coe and Jacques Rogge welcome the athletes, before handing over to countryman, colleague and fellow President Van Rompuy, who declares the Games open. This is the 2012 summer Olympics, the first Games with a unified EU team, held in the new federation's northern financial and cultural capital, London. As usual, local traditions, heroes and history are prominant - and the Queen is naturally present as a VIP - but this is, and will always be known as, the EU Games, and London is cheering on the home team.

On the face of it, it's not such an unlikely scenario, and could have been reality as far back as 1992 when the idea was first mooted. The constituent countries of the United Kingdom have a problem with self-identity, particularly in sport. Many hours have been wasted trying to explain the differences between England, Great Britain and the UK - particularly when non-European languages like Chinese are unable to distinguish between the English 'nation', 'state' and 'country'. 'Team GB' doesn't feel a natural fit to most sports fans (note the palaver over the GB football team), yet the Olympics is one of the only occasions when the sporting entity closely matches the political entity. (And it does - Northern Irish athletes can and do represent Great Britain depending on their personal affiliation; the team name only doesn't reflect this for causing a spat with the Republic, whose NOC claims representation of the whole island. The only disconnect with political status is that some, but not all, Overseas Territories and Crown Dependencies have their own NOC; as a result, Team GB gains the likes of Shara Proctor of Anguilla, Mark Cavendish of the Isle of Man and Carl Hester of Sark). It's only now that Team GB is consistently successful that the unionist idea receives such a boost from the Olympics - in 1996, when they flopped in Atlanta after England hosted the European Football Championships, it felt anachronistic.

The Olympics, despite the universal humanist drive, places a high value on nation states and nationalism. Yet political groupings are so fluid - in its time the Olympics has seen teams from the British West Indies, Bohemia, North Borneo, and 2012 was the first Games following the constitutional realignment of the Dutch Antilles and the dissolution of the Netherlands Antilles NOC, leading to some Curacao athletes (like Churandy Martina) competing for the Netherlands while others competed as independents. Given constitutional and identity flux, it is not without the realm of possibility that Team GB will not exist in its present form at Olympic Games in the mid-future; the same can be said of Spain, Serbia and some other European nations. Theoretically, the EU is one treaty away from being a sporting entity. It is nevertheless extremely unlikely - even in the event of greater political union, the strength of history and tradition would surely maintain the traditional sporting units. An EU state would necessarily be far more localist than the US (where many regions did not form such strong identities prior to statehood) and China (where regional distinction is actively discouraged). Europe was forged in difference, conflict and opposition, from Charlemagne to Eurovision, and is arguably much the greater for it (while neutral Switzerland has the cuckoo clock); the US and China were forged in union. The Roman and Han Empires were comparable in size, time and scope; when the Roman Empire fell Europe disintegrated, when the Han fell China remained (largely) united, and thus both have remained since. A unified Team EU is realistically as likely as separate Guangdong and California teams competing.

(Incidentally, modelling a unified team is far easier than breaking up existing teams into regions - trying to understand exactly how a Yorkshire, Guangdong or California team would match up in 2012 would require not only very complete personal data but a very broad series of assumptions about representation requirements, how to split out existing basketball teams and rowing crews, but also greater knowledge of lower levels of sport in each region. The imaginary Yorkshire team would not just consist of Jess Ennis and the Brownlees, but would also be trawling the Dales for athletes to compete in table tennis and swimming; equally they would not benefit from the established Team GB funding and coaching set up and would be replaced in the GB team by other athletes, who may well push them harder than if they were the sole GB representatives.)

So, most importantly; how did the home team do?

The simple answer is that this sporting titan trounced the world. EU organs have enjoyed publicising this (see this, during the Olympic build up, and others just a Google away), and it's undeniably true. Taking the combined medal total from all the current EU countries (Croatia will have to wait until 2016 to have its athletes subsumed, surely making their water polo victory even sweeter) gives 92 golds, exactly two times the US total. And if we used the medal-first table, the victory is even more crushing: 305 medals to America's 104. Clearly game, set and match. It's also a resounding medals per capita victory; the EU may be notably more populous than the US (c.500m to c.300m), but not enough to put the victory down to scale, and it's still less than half the size of China. With the skills and traditions formed in intra-European competition, a combined team would take on the new world with some style.

Unsurprisingly, the large Western European countries dominate the medal contributors, with host Great Britain supplying over a fifth of the EU medals. Ever since 1992, when there were just 12 of these core members, EU athletes have accumulated more than 200 medals - enough to trounce China, Russia and the US quite comprehensively. And as the EU has grown, so has the medal haul, although not quite at the same pace, the newer members generally being smaller and contributing fewer medals, but more medals in more sports (Bulgarian wrestlers and Romanian gymnasts, for instance). In 2012, over two thirds of all medals won by European countries were won by EU athletes.

Unfortunately, even ignoring national prejudices, it's more complicated than that. This is the Olympics - unlike many other elite sporting competitions, politics, diplomacy and the 'Olympic spirit' are as outstanding as sporting competition and the competitors are not simply a rollcall of the best athletes in their class or division. The best are invariably present, injuries aside, but it's further down the field that representation suffers. This is particularly true for nations who dominate individual sports an events and, Jamaican sprinters and East African distance runners excepted, these are generally the biggest, strongest nations: many of the finest Russian modern pentathletes, US swimmers and Chinese divers miss out on the Olympics in order that smaller countries are represented by their own champions. This simple combined EU team is 3,700 strong, over a third of all competitors; in reality it would have to compete in proportion to its political power as one NOC like India, China and the US, and simply would not have as many athletes. While this would fortify and intensify the EU team's domination in sports like equestrian and handball, where Europe has always dominated, there can be no doubt that the competitiveness would be greatly reduced, and it would take a few bad rolls of the dice by the EU athletes to let in some strange looking champions.

Olympic entry requirements are complex, and defined by each sport individually in order to maximise the world appeal, not the competitiveness. Competitions like tennis grand slams can have as many entrants from each country as the world rankings implies, as the athletes are generally competing primarily for themselves, not for the country. For instance, if the top 100 tennis players came from Fiji, Wimbledon would consist of 100 Fijians, plus the usual selection of invitationals, wildcards and qualifiers. Olympic tennis, meanwhile, would consist of no more than 10 Fijians, as it is a competition that must appeal worldwide and with a nation against nation ethos. For some sports the rules are particularly strict - track cycling is limited to one national entry per event. With few events allowing more than 3 entrants per country (this could only theoretically happen in equestrian and weightlifting), 1-2-3 podium finishes are extremely rare; in 2012 this only happened in the men's 200m (Jamaica) and women's individual foil (Italy). However, there were 21 events in which EU countries took gold, silver and bronze; it should be no surprise that 15 of these came in canoeing, cycling, equestrian and sailing, all sports with a one-nation-per-event rule. EU dominance would be neutered if it competed as one team with the same rules in place; rivalries like Kenny vs  Baugé would be decided round a table in Brussels, not in the velodrome, just like Kenny vs Hoy was. And incidentally, neither Kenny nor Baugé would even make the team.

Which leads to step two: lining the athletes up against a wall and picking a team.

Or rather, building a fairly simple selection model. As a disclaimer, it is almost certainly not perfect and would doubtless give different results if replicated, but I am very content with its accuracy and consistency to a high degree. So, the method:

Following each federation's selection criteria, and assuming that the EU selectors are logical and consistent with regards to recent competitions and rankings (a big assumption), Team EU is eligible to enter almost every competition (save some weightlifting and wrestling weight divisions). In team or group competitions, we have to assume that the highest ranked national team is selected to represent the whole EU (e.g., the Spanish men's football team and the German men's eight compete as they exist but with EU badges, as the England amateur football team used to compete as Great Britain) as there is no way to model how a combined team would be picked.

For instance: for athletics, a country can choose up to three competitors for each event if they all achieve the 'A' qualifying standard during the qualifying period at approved events. The high standard of European athletics means that three or more achieve this in almost every event. We must then assume that our Brussels selectors choose the three competitors with the best results in the season (results are here). For the men's hammer throw, for instance, Krisztian Pars (HUN), Pawel Fajdek (POL) and Nicolas Figere (FRA) are the three highest performers: they make the team. In reality, selectors might prefer Olympic champion Primož Kozmus (SLO), who was only the 11th best EU thrower in the season but had shown consistency in competitions and had a further throw than Figere over the whole qualifying period (not just the season). In the name of methodological logic and consistency, he is not chosen, and Team EU misses out on a medal: Kozmus actually got a silver medal for the hammer throw. In the Team EU scenario, Koji Murofushi is bumped up to silver and Ukraine's Olexiy Sokyyrshkiyy is the new bronze medalist. Likewise, as a team the German women's 4x100m relay team clocked the fastest time in qualifying, and are chosen in their entirety to represent the EU. In some events (e.g., rowing and sailing) athletes we selected based on results at recent championships - the highest EU finisher is taken per event. In others, more discretion is needed; a maximum of six male weightlifters can be selected across weight classes, so the six best overall EU performers at the recent championships are taken. For artistic gymnastics and equestrian, the best combination of five gymnasts who can perform in individual events and contribute to the overall team scores are chosen - as team scores are cumulative and can be modelled based on results, mixed nationality teams can be chosen and they are exceptions to the representative team rule.

Combined with hosting prerogatives (although the athletes generally qualify without it), Team EU is vast - 726 strong, nearly two hundred larger than the GB and US teams. It is dominated by Germany, France and Great Britain (although Spanish basketball, football, synchronised swimming and water polo teams boost their representation). The largest 9 nations make up c.85% of Team EU's athletes, whereas they only sent 70% of the EU athletes to London 2012. Smaller nations are squeezed out, as is Britain; with the host prerogative shared across Europe, a results-based selector would take more Germans than Britons, and about the same number of French. Only one in five of Britain's 2012 Olympians would also qualify with Team EU - 138 of these are due to losing the handball, volleyball, football, water polo and basketball teams, which would almost certainly not have qualified were Britain not hosting the Games. Almost all the smaller nations are squeezed down, but just two nations are totally unrepresented: Luxembourg and Cyprus (Malta's William Chetcuti qualifies for the double trap). That 2012 produced, in truth, the first Cypriot medal is a sign of how competitive the selection is.

Missing out Primož Kozmus and Pavlos Kontides are not the only poor selection choices made by my imaginary sporting Eurocrats; around 100 medal-winning athletes or teams do not make the EU team as they were not the highest ranked competitor or world champion at the time of selection - and about a third of these are British. Thus the Greek women's lightweight double scull crew is selected ahead of eventual gold medallists Copeland and Hosking, Simona Krupeckaite is the EU representative for both the women's sprint and keirin, for which she finished 5th and 7th respectively, and nine gold medal winning canoeists or canoe teams are not selected. For the sports in which the EU dominates, this makes little difference to the overall gold tally - in most cases, for instance Hunter and Purchase, the EU selection finished behind other EU competitors who miss out, and so are promoted up to gold.

Removing so many competitors due to one-entrant-per-nation rules does have a big effect on the overall number of medals. EU athletes won 305 medals at the 2012 Games; if we wedge them into the same team and subject them to pre-selection under existing rules, this nearly halves to 180. This is still enough to beat the US comfortably (74 of the 180 are gold), but the effect of integration is distillation. It is the British athletes - many of whom were not ranked highly enough to warrant selection in such a competitive environment, but who pulled through with the home crowd to achieve gold - who lose the most. 9 British gold medalists do not win in this scenario.

NB; modelling results, particularly in non-ranked knockout events (judo, tennis taekwondo), those dominated by Europe (canoeing, cycling), and those (equestrian, gymnastics) with mixed teams also competing as individuals, are tough to model when a large number of competitors are removed. A basic set of counterfactual assumptions have been applied consistently to achieve the results (e.g., if the selected athlete loses to a non-selected EU athlete in semi or quarter finals, they accede to the medals their defeater assumed); other assumptions would change the results, as would other selection assumptions, but the effect would not be significant.

Removing so many EU medalists also paves the way for other nations to step up and earn more. Of the 12 canoe slalom medals won in 2012, only one went to a non-EU country; with a combined EU team and 2012 rules, this rises to 7. EU sailors win 15 fewer medals than they did in truth, and Croatia, New Zealand and Australia step up to take them. 18 gold medals are lost through poor selections, of which 6 go to China; Russia, Australia and New Zealand, who are consistently competitive in the same sports as the EU, are the other biggest beneficiaries. Non-EU countries with a similar sporting profile to the EU such as Switzerland, Norway, San Marino, Iceland and Croatia make some notable gains too, and we see Pakistan, Ghana, Israel, Mauritius and Togo make it onto the medal table.

So Britain's success, so boosted by their home support, is massively diluted within the EU team - British Olympians would have won 32 fewer medals had they had to qualify for and compete for Team EU. The pay off - Britain can say that they top the medal table, but the only Union Jacks hoisted were in the cantons of Australia and New Zealand. So the winners outside the EU? The European and Anglophone countries who are competitive in Europe-dominated sports, but who are not in the EU. If an EU team ever became a reality, expect Australia, New Zealand and Switzerland to assume the dissolved entities' positions in the medal table.

Such counterfactuals only go so far, however. The entire funding, coaching and support structure of Team EU would be completely overhauled with shared facilities and systems, and the results would filter down - I won't suggest if they would be improved or worsened as a result of being centralised. And what of the home support? Jess Ennis and Chris Hoy received as much support in London as Londoners; the Dorney roar boosted Ulstermen and Londoners to medals alike, even for a country used to supporting its constituent parts against each other. Perhaps we can assume then that the crowd would have been fully behind Team EU and would been blind to the athletes' home nations, although eurosceptic MEP Daniel Hannan delights in pointing out that this may not be the case, and on the basis of most British attitudes to Europe he may be right. If Paris had won the 2012 Olympics, the support for Team EU would surely be fairly unconditional. Even the only major sporting tournament where 'Europe' competes - the Ryder Cup - is a poor model to measure support levels from, as the bulk of the European team tends to come from more Eurosceptic Britiain. But it's also possible that the support would have been as vocal for Lithuanians, Bulgarians and Portuguese clad in the same kit as the British athletes. This means that using the London results alone would miss out a key driver of success; doubtless this would have a significant effect on the final results.

A final large assumption is that the qualification rules remain the same; Europe's nominal overrepresentation in sports like cycling would be so reduced, and such a significant power and fan base disenfranchised and disappointed by the lack of competitive representation, that it is hard to imagine that the criteria would remain unchanged. And finally, would the grassroots legacy be lessened by much tougher qualification standards (particularly for smaller unrepresented countries), or heightened by the huge national success?

Equally, if we're trying to model how Team EU would perform, why not ask how Guangdong and California would do? On the European example, the sum of the US and China's constituent parts would be much greater than the whole; California would surely be an extremely formidable presence on the medal table, particularly if inter-State competition were as intense as intra-European competition is. On the other hand, the cumulative results of the constituent nations of the former Yugoslavia and Soviet Union (several of whom now represent the EU) are not much greater than when they were heavily funded, centralised sporting units; and this is achieved with much inter-FSU competition in their traditionally strong events (weightlifting, wrestling etc) which would be nullified if reunited.

If it ever happens, the introduction of a Team EU would be the biggest shake-up to the politics, diplomacy and sporting competition of the Olympics since it became a truly global event; bigger than China's emergence or the Soviet Union's collapse. But despite making them winners, would it risk losing the hearts of most of the EU's citizens?

Go fourth

 

This is the moment that Alessandra Perilli missed a target in the 2012 women's trap final shoot off, condemning her to fourth place, and handing Zuzana Štefečeková of Slovakia and Delphine Réau of France the remaining two medals. To be the fourth best in the world at anything is formidable, but fourth in an Olympic discipline, separated by one lump of clay? Devastating. And for Perilli, and thirty thousand people on a hill in Italy, doubly so: Perilli represents San Marino (although she is Italian born), and an Olympic bronze would have represented probably the single greatest moment in national sporting history in a country for whom having led the England football team for twenty minutes in 1993 (before losing 7-1) is their current zenith. Like Benjamin Boukpeti and others before her, Olympic bronze would have doubtless have transformed her national fame from present to timeless - and for all that Réau and Štefečeková's medals were earned, warranted and life-changing, the same cannot be said for them. But it wasn't to be. Perilli joined Ele Opeloge as a heartbreaking fourth-placer instead. And why? The boundary was set at three: gold, silver, bronze for the first three finishers, as standard from 1904 and applied retrospectively by the IOC. The mystical and rhetorical power of three has persisted from Calvary to De La Soul - it makes for a beautiful podium symmetry and, for 8-person finals, a real distinguishing mark for the elite of the elite. But what if they'd chosen four?

For a start, San Marino and Samoa would have broken their Olympic medal ducks; their best chances may not come again for a while (no doubt Samoa will have their sights on Rugby Sevens from 2016). All of San Marino's team, other than Perilli, was competing on wildcards, and not one of them progressed beyond the opening rounds of their respective competitions. I watched the entirety of Emmanuele Guidi's entire 2012 archery campaign. Seeded last after the qualifying round, Guidi faced first seed and Korean superstar Im Dong-Hyun, who had newly broken the world record, in a first round match. From the moment Im stepped out I found myself sitting in a sea of raving taegeukgi; for Guidi, there hung a lone San Marino flag by a woman and a young child from the Lord's members' balcony (a penny for the MCC's thoughts). He performed well, but Guidi never stand a chance; Im won 6-0. But it wouldn't have been the Olympics without him. Wildcards like Guidi make the Olympics the celebration of humanity and peace that it purports to be. Without the wildcard, there would be no team present from many, if not most, countries of the world, invalidating the Olympics' very purpose. Spotting the tiny teams from previously unheard-of nations (invariably with spectacular costumes and buckets of pride) is one of the joys of the opening ceremony for households across Europe. Nationality restrictions and wildcards may seem arbitrary - and may lengthen the opening ceremony and 100m competitions by several hours - but it is watching the unlikely Guidi that makes the Olympics the Olympics.

So imagine that Perilli is standing on an extended podium in Woolwich to receive her medal. I'm going to assume it's iron; of the elemental metals in US tradition of wedding anniversary gifts, iron ranks just below bronze (let's ignore tin, which interrupts bronze and silver). La Tribuna holds the front page for the ironclad Alessandra's beaming face as she bites her medal, and San Marino is, for the first time in its history, on the medal table.

(NB, in accordance with standard practice when multiple medals are awarded, no 'irons' have been awarded where more than one bronze is given, e.g., for boxing, taekwondo, men's high jump etc)

What can we read into these? Vietnam, as well as relatively large teams Austria, Chile and Nigeria join San Marino as new entrants to the medal table, and 58 of the 85 medal winning countries also add to their totals, enabling many of them to differentiate themselves from other countries in the IOC-preferred gold-first medal table, which otherwise changes little. The total medal table, on the other hand, sees quite a bit of a shake-up, not least in pushing Russia even closer to China and boosting France to 6th at Japan's expense. The Games no longer appears to be a battle for first and third, but a fight for second place.

It's a measure of the United States' strength in depth that they also top the fourth place medal table by some distance. Male American track and field athletes pick up seven alone; Taylor Phinney becomes a double medalist and Michael Phelps adds to his haul, although the US's strength in the pool leaves only four irons for them. Russia, whose medal total was weighted to bronze, pick up another 20 medals, greater than China and far more than their rivals for third place overall, Great Britain. France, Ukraine and Spain's high number of fourth places hint that they were unlucky not to finish higher, whereas Kazakhstan's total lack reaffirms their apparent 'go for gold' only tactic. A lack of fourth places can be either due to winning nothing, or to having already won everything. So if we compare the number of top three places with the number of fourth places, we can gain some insight into comparative success. Assuming that a country 'should' get one fourth place finish for every three in the top three, we can provide one method for assessing which countries over and underperformed in the standard medal table. In the chart below, the diagonal line indicates the fair distribution of fourth places against top three finishes. Countries in blue achieved an iron: other medal ratio within 25% of this line; those in green achieved significantly more fourth places than they did other medals (relatively), and the few countries in silver can be said to have overperformed in converting their top 4 finishes into traditional gold, silver and bronze medals.

Notable among these are the overperformers in silver. Why are Belarus, Brazil, Japan, China and Great Britain more successful in converting strong achievers into medals, and thus miss out on the agonising fourth places? For Great Britain, home advantage must play a part; the athlete who may come in fourth or fifth will doubtless be spurred by a home crowd to third; the athletes further back may not necessarily be able to convert their lowlier finishes into fourth. Nevertheless, several of their fourth places (Dai Greene, Daley and Waterfield, Keri-Anne Payne) were popularly considered missed medal opportunities. Since 2000, China have consistently achieved a very high athlete-medal conversion rate, and their medal hauls are strongly weighted to gold, rather than being evenly distributed as you would expect, and as United States' and Russia's usually are (although the US was notably more gold-heavy in 2012). This strongly suggests a heavy emphasis on single minded, gold-at-all-costs training regimes for a select few elite, leading to a dominance in smaller events with few competitors per country and fewer medals available (table tennis, badminton) rather than the multi-event, multi-athlete per country events. It works though; even without home advantage and with a smaller team, China pushed the United States close in the gold-first table.

Factoring in fourth places also reveals the varying extent of public attitudes to success. Jamaica, whose dominance of sprinting is relatively recent, was delighted with its performance at the Games. Kenya, now an established long distance power, was disappointed, despite Raila Odinga's attempts to point out that in London Kenya outperformed their record at all but one (Beijing) of the last five Games. Above you can see that, when fourth places are included, Jamaica and Kenya have the same number of total medals. You can also see from the chart below, they entered an almost identical number of athletes into track and road events, and both finished with a 50/50 success rate when we consider top 8 finishers. Using this measure, both nations were equally successful. However, only half of Kenya's top 8 finishes were in the top three, compared to two-thirds of Jamaica's. Factor in fourth places, however, and their medal conversion rates are roughly equal. There are other factors at play of course - Jamaica's rising trend, Kenya's apparent decline; Jamaica's simultaneous independence celebrations; Jamaica's victories in their blue riband events (men's 100m, 200m), Kenya's failures in theirs (men's marathon, 10,000m) - but the difference between resounding success and huge disappointment in the respective public consciousnesses appears to be built not on objective overall performance, but on the 'failure' accorded the 4 fourth places achieved by Kenyan women. There can be no doubt that while total medals may be a more objective measure of success, it is golds, not medals, that really affect public perception - another reason why the IOC prefers the gold-first medal table format (handily, the one in which Britain beat Russia). Fourth, it seems, really does count for very little.

This is, of course, entirely hypothetical - the nature of almost all competitions would be entirely changed if the fourth placed finisher also 'won'. How would bronze medals play-offs be fought? But it shows the almost futile nature of the otherwise necessary arbitrary boundaries of competitive success. A medal for fourth would have seen San Marino blow apart the much-loved per capita medal table as topped by Grenada, as well as achieve an astounding 25% event-to-medal conversion rate. Precisely the same exercise could be carried out for top 8, or top 20 finishes. A medal table truly and objectively fair to the competition would be based on awards of varying degrees assigned to all finishers in all events - weighted according to number of competitors - from first to last; as it is, most competing countries are inseparable on the medal table by virtue of not scoring. Thanks to Perilli, Sammarinese competitors as a whole outshone those from, say, Monaco, but you wouldn't know from the medal table. But therein lies the problem - the medal table is a construct for the Olympic fans who favour competition over human celebration, but if that were the sole driver for the Olympic movement, half of the teams wouldn't be there, and the Olympics wouldn't be able to capture the hearts of the millions of Londoners and billions of TV viewers who just expected some sport, and found themselves lost in 2012.