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 10th
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.
