Adding Parity to the measure of Olympic Success

A suggestion for the International Olympic Committee

I am a big fan of sports, and fair play. Having been born in the US but raised in Costa Rica, I always loved supporting both countries. The problem is that it is hard to see a small country like Costa Rica, that can only provide less than 10 athletes an opportunity to compete in the Olympics and let alone have a chance at medals be recognized when they do achieve any amount of success. Even when they do achieve Olympic success, that success is overshadowed by countries that have the ability to send hundreds of athletes to the games, but many only achieve marginal success when you consider the total number of their athletes. So, I began playing with the idea of creating what I call an Olympic Success Parity Index or OSPI, which evaluates the per capita success of each country based on the size of their team and the relative value of each medal won. Because a Gold Medal is the ultimate goal, it should have the highest value, say double that of a Silver Medal and a Silver Medal should be double the value of a Bronze Medal. So, in the simplest of ranges we say Gold = 4 pts., Silver = 2 pts., and Bronze = 1 pt. By multiplying the number of medals of each type by their corresponding value, you get a Medals Total Value or MTV. If say one country has achieved 5 Gold, but only 2 Silver and 4 Bronze (13 total medals), its MTV would be 30. If another country achieves 2 Gold, but 9 Silver and 7 Bronze (18 medals), its MTV would be 33. This distribution of course is highly unlikely but possible. Now say the first team had 218 Athletes, and the second one had 345 then the Olympic Success Parity Index would be calculated thus:

Total medals divided by size of team then multiplied by the MTV

Team One would be (13/218) X 30 or an OSPI of 1.79

Team two would be (18/345) X 33 or an OSPI of 1.72

So even though the MTV of the second team was 3 points higher, the Olympic Success Rate per Capita was higher than that of team two.

I created a spreadsheet that tracks the 2024 Paris Olympics to test my theory, and the graph below shows the top 25 ranked countries by OSPI. Note that the top medal earners are still ranked high on the list, but countries like St Lucia and People's Democratic Republic of Korea with just 4 and 16 athletes participating in the games have earned enough medals to raise their OSPI to rank them 10th and 13th respectively despite only having 2 and 5 medals each, which shows that even though their teams were small, their comparative success was recognized through a process of including a parity index to account for team size.

Why is this important? Because in terms of analyzing economic success of a city, a state, Province or country, only the largest players get recognized, even though in terms of success per capita added value many smaller companies, cities, counties and Countries may be more successful that the larger ones. we want equity, we want inclusion, lets add parity to the mix by weighing the per capita input of each team or business or geographic designation.

Just my thoughts! Please share yours!