With 103 medals the USA appeared to be the most successfully Olympic nation. This is not so surprising when you consider its superpower status. If you take into account the size and GNP of each country you get a very different result. This table puts the USA’s great enemy in first place. Cuba tops the economic table with just $1bn of GNP per medal. Well down the table was the UK ($55bn per medal). The USA was near the bottom with over $100bn per medal. It seems that American sanctions against Cuba is having an undesirable impact. Cuba also has a higher literacy rate and a lower infant-mortality rate that the USA.

Recently George Bush promised to overthrow Castro if he is re-elected. Maybe he would be better off sending a fact-finding team to Cuba to find out the secret of its success.

John penned

[...]

Maybe he would be better off sending a fact-finding team to Cuba to find out the secret of its success.

--------------

LOL, With you permission, I'll forward this to the DNC. The campaign could use some fresh redmeat

David Healy

Here's another method of calculating who won the Olympics.
http://xtramsn.co.nz/sport/0,,11945-3625437,00.html

We'll expect the fact-finders on the next plane from DC

Looking at the medals tables for the Winter Olympics recently, I noticed that the two countries that had most often come top were the USSR (with a very large population) and Norway (with about 5 million people).

Funnily enough, the UK, Australia, New Zealand and South Africa have never done much at the Winter Olympics. Indeed, the performance of African nations generally is unimpressive. I wonder why that is.

I doubt if this correlates closely to GNP. The relevant factors seem to be a population large enough for there to be competition for places in all events, a lot of snow and mountains, and a few centuries of experience in coping with them. The German soldiers pursuing the Norwegian saboteurs on the Telemark plateau in 1943 were never in with a chance.