And the real winner of the 2006 Winter Olympics is...

Norway. Don't agree with me? Click here for details. You may have to refresh that window if it doesn't load the first time.

As you can see, looking at the second table, Norway is the real winner of the 2006 Winter Olympics. Based on their talent pool of 4,593,041 people, they won 19 medals. In other words, based on their population, Norway won one medal per 241,739 people. Canada didn't fair too badly either, coming in at 7th with one medal per 1,366,877 people. The United States, finishing second overall in the actual medal count, didn't fair too well when you consider the large talent pool that it has to draw from. When you take into account medal per unit of population, the United States came in at 21st out of a possible 26 countries. Only five countries finished worse than the United States in that regard: Poland, Ukraine, Great Britain, China, and Japan. Not exactly the greatest of company when you think of Winter Olympic success.

I got my population and medal count information from
here. I also double checked the CIA's World Fact Book to verify my population numbers, and the CIA's page matched most of the figures I have.

I hope you found my analysis interesting. I sure did.