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Unusual Maps has a fascinating illustration of the world filtered by the number of Olympic medals won per million people. The results surprise: among the top countries for number of medal athletes per million you'll find Australia, Norway, Belarus, Cuba, Bulgaria, and Hungary as the leaders in producing Olympians per capita in the world. There are some logical reasons for this. Cuba boasts a large, state-sponsored Olympic program based on the old Soviet model that cranked out medals during the Cold War as a symbol of national pride and international status. Norway dominates winter sports, perhaps the most Eurocentric of the Olympics in that you need to be from a cold place, and you have to be able to afford expensive equipment and facilities. And as for the Eastern European contingent, we're positing that they're still cruising on the fumes of the old state-sponsored Communist athletic programs. (In Romania's case, gymnastics.)
The Australian contingent, though, may just benefit from being a small but sport-mad population that's spread across a vast territory. Besides our theory of innate Aussie awesomeness, this might be the only explanation for their high ranking.
The other discovery from the map, and an unsurprising one: it takes
money to succeed in the Olympics. Poor countries are all a uniform
blue on the map, indicating a dearth of medal winners per million.
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