Medal Per Capital Table Puts NZ up Top in Rio

New Zealand computer scientist Craig Nevill-Manning’s Medal Per Capita table put this year’s New Zealand Olympic team near the top, placing fourth with 18 medals and a population of 4,595,700. That’s one medal for every 255,316 people.

New Zealand, a contender for the world’s true sporting greats with 18 medals, won with a population of 4.6 million, despite being only 13th in the official table.

At the top of Nevill-Manning’s “total medals per capita” table is Grenada, whose one medal – runner Kirani James’s silver in the men’s 10,000m – puts the tiny island nation of just over 100,000 people in first place.

The site also ranked countries’ medals by GDP, because as Nevill-Manning says, “it’s a little unfair to ignore the relative wealth of countries”.

When the relative population of each country is taken into account, the United States ranked only 40th.

Nevill-Manning founded Google’s first remote engineering centre, located in New York City. He currently works at Alphabet Inc. subsidiary Sidewalks Lab as chief technology officer.

Original article by Katie Forster, The Independent, August 18, 2016.