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Path: utzoo!watmath!watcgl!sahayman
From: sahayman@watcgl.UUCP (Steve Hayman)
Newsgroups: net.sport
Subject: The real Olympic winner - the envelope please...
Message-ID: <3002@watcgl.UUCP>
Date: Fri, 24-Aug-84 03:47:46 EDT
Article-I.D.: watcgl.3002
Posted: Fri Aug 24 03:47:46 1984
Date-Received: Fri, 24-Aug-84 04:47:20 EDT
Organization: U. of Waterloo Warriors Band
Lines: 39

(I wish I had the actual numbers in front of me to back up the forthcoming
 statistics.  But I can't find them.  So trust me! The end result is
 known to be correct.)

Well, we all saw the USA run away with a whole passel of medals in
Los Angeles.  And a fine job they did, but let's be fair and
consider two factors -

1) The U.S. is a big country
2) Powerful Eastern block countries were absent.

So how can we come up with some objective way of evaluating the
performance of the participating countries?  To balance out
populations we can consider the Per Capita medal count.  On that
basis the overall winner was Iceland, with Canada 4th (I think)
and the U.S. a respectable 13th (Better luck next time!).

However this statistic doesn't take into account the lack of the
Soviet Union, East Germany etc as some medals were won which would
not have been otherwise.  So let's consider world records - anyone
who set a world record would probably have won a gold even if the
Russians were there.

Again we find the Americans in front with 19 world records, West
Germany and Canada next with 4 each.  Of course we must compensate
again for the differing populations.  Once we do this, we can
conclude that by the only TRUE, UNBIASED measure of Olympic success,
namely World Records Per Capita, the overall Olympic champion country
was...


Canada.


Standing on guard for thee,
Steve Hayman
University of Waterloo Warriors Band
Official Band of the Canadian Olympic Basketball Teams