Abstract
The achievement of international and especially Olympic sporting success is increasingly important to a growing number of countries. It is however not clear how success is defined and can be measured. The number of medals won in Olympics Games and other international sport competitions offers the most self-evident and transparent measure of success in high performance sport. In this article different methods to measure success of nations are compared. Market share was identified as the best measure of absolute success which enables meaningful time series analysis to be conducted. A Linear regression analysis is used to introduce relative success as a measurement of success when controlling for macro determinants such as population and wealth. This method allows comparing nations on more equal grounds, which is necessary if one wants to measure effectiveness of elite sport policies. Similar analysis is done for Olympic Summer and Winter Sports. It is concluded that conflicting results can be given on nations’ success. Defining success therefore depends on the purpose wherefore it is used and on the priorities of individual nations.
Highlights
Measuring absolute success of nationsSource: IOC, 2004** correlation is significant at 0,01 level10 Using one Olympic Games may result in coincidental rankings
44 The key purpose of this article has been to demonstrate a methodology by which an objective assessment of performance can be made using techniques that have both an absolute and relative nature. Each of these methods – in their own specific way – allows countries to be classified with respect to their absolute and relative sporting success
An objective performance ranking of nations, in order to identify a link between performance and policy, has proven to be an ambitious task because the sporting priorities of individual nations vary along winter or summer sports and because the ranking differs along the purpose of the success measurements
Summary
10 Using one Olympic Games may result in coincidental rankings. For example the Netherlands won only 4 gold medals (22 in total) in Athens but they won 12 gold (25 in total) in Sydney 2000. 20 With the Athens 2004 Olympic Games as a point of departure a linear regression analysis (OLS) of socio-economic factors that influence (absolute) sporting success was carried out using the Statistical Package for the Social Sciences (SPSS). 29 Table 4 offers an overview of the ten countries with the greatest relative success in Athens, taking the differences in population size, wealth and, where relevant, the (former) communist character of the country into consideration This ranking reflects the regression residuals [residual = absolute success - predicted success] in the multidimensional model with only the significant variables. The latter may partly be explained by the fact that our analysis is confined to medal winning nations This finding corresponds with earlier findings of Kuper and Sterken (2003b) who estimated time series models for each Olympic Games from 1924-1998. This measure needs to be able to change more frequently than once every four years and needs to rate recent success more highly than historical success
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