Beijing and the odd world of statistics

I don't know if you heard Professor David Forrest on Radio 4's Today Programme yesterday, talking to Evan Davies about Olympic medal ranking? David Forrest is something of a world expert on sport economics and has proved a statistically strong link between a country's GDP and its medal ranking, so the USA will top the medal board so long as it remains the world's richest economy. China can be expected to do better and better in medal rankings as its economy grows. No great surprise, you might think: richer countries can afford better facilities for their sporting talent and have fewer demands competing for the spend. Money buys success right?

Not always. Professor Forrest went on to single out some notable anomalies to this broad correlation. Some countries spectacularly outperform their GDP-place, for example Australia, and others equally spectacularly underperform, for example India. Forrest went on to suggest some reasons for this: India's national obsession with cricket effectively channels all the national effort into one single team sport. Australia, by contrast, is strong in individual sports, especially swimming, and there are more medals to be won in the pool than anywhere else, so skewing their odds on the medal board. He also pointed out that the rankings are done by gold medals first so a country that has won a single gold will be ranked above one that may have twenty silvers. 

Listening to this piece got me thinking about the world of statistics and odds. How the way we have chosen to construct our Olympics medal boards reflects a value system that ranks being the best (gold) in a single endeavour way above coming second (silver) any number of times. 

As we in the UK provide fewer and fewer measures of real excellence, preferring to get more into a broader category ('A' grades at 'A' level or first class degrees), something tells me we're missing the point badly. Go for gold, be the best, or stay at home.