Norway, Switzerland And Sweden Are The Real 2010 Winners

As the imported snow starts to melt, the nation of Canada are furiously pounding their collective calculators to add up how much the last two weeks has cost them. Actually, they will probably spend the next fortnight gloating about the ice hockey gold medal - the finances can take a back seat for the time being.





But who are the real winners? Was it the Canadian hosts who won a Winter Games record 14 gold medals? Was it the USA who won a record 37 medals? Actually no. Any country with a large population is going to be at a natural advantage since there's a greater pool of talent to choose from and so a higher likelihood of more medals of whatever color. Of course, having a large proportion of its citizens living in igloos and eating seal blubber is also an advantage, but population size is still a key factor. So when you take population into account, how much does the medal table change?


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The table is sorted by the final column which represents the millions of a country's population needed to win a gold medal so the lower the number the better. Sitting pretty at the top there is Norway who managed to get one gold medal for just over every 500,000 people; contrast that with China who needed 267,000,000 people to get a single gold. Notable mentions go to Switzerland And Sweden with an impressive haul when accounting for their population. And even a nod to Canada who were the most successful large country (10+ million population) at the Winter Games - as if they needed another pat on the back.