Olympic medals can be more compelling than sport itself.
By Wednesday morning, France had won 48 of them at the Paris Games. This has helped fill the host country with a sense of collective accomplishment that I haven’t seen since moving here in 2002.
And the French have a point. Olympic medals are usually a signal that a society is doing important things right, far beyond sport.
To understand why, study the upper reaches of the medals table. One long-term presence there is missing this time: Russia, banned for invading Ukraine. (Fifteen individual Russians are competing here, but not under the national flag.)
Note that Russia was also banned from the previous Games for its programme of “mass doping”.
That leaves the US in first place and China second (with 1.4 billion people, rising wealth and, western critics allege, rampant doping of its swimmers).
Here’s the remarkable fact: the next 14 countries in the medals table are all high-income democracies.
The success of the latter isn’t a geographical effect: they range from Canada through Romania to Australia and South Korea. Although the whole world is competing here, a certain category of country dominates.
The medals table from the last winter Olympics has a similar makeup: the top eight consists of seven high-income democracies plus China.
And when the economist Stefan Szymanski and I constructed an all-time table of athletic achievement, based on the Olympics and other international competitions, for our book Soccernomics, we found that the world’s best sporting country per capita was rich, democratic Norway.
Clearly any ranking of national athletic achievement will be highly correlated with national wealth and, more specifically, human development.
The UN’s human development index measures life expectancy, education and living standards to rank all countries according to their wellbeing. Of the top 10 nations in the UN’s rankings, Norway, Sweden and Switzerland also made the top 10 for the last winter Olympics; Australia and Germany are in the top 10 of this summer’s medals table; while Ireland is 12th in Paris, and Hong Kong 21st.
Most of these countries have achieved this despite small populations. Ireland, with five million inhabitants, had four golds by Wednesday — as many as all of Africa combined.
How to explain this? Rich democracies, especially social democracies, are good at taking care of their inhabitants. That includes providing people of all income levels with the opportunity to play sport.
Even in the remotest outposts of Norway, for instance, there’s generally an all-weather sports ground around the corner. Usually the changing rooms are warm, the coaches have diplomas, and kids can train and play at a reasonable price.
Eighty-four % of Norway’s population did sporting, fitness or recreational physical activity at least once a week in 2019, the highest level in already sporty Europe, according to the European Commission.
National sporting success is usually a proxy for broader strengths. A country that’s good at providing sports fields and coaches for everyone, as most democracies are, tends to be good at providing healthcare and schools for everyone.
Being rich and democratic and well educated and good at sport are all generally part of the same thing. Most people in rich countries get a chance to play sport, and a handful end up with Olympic medals.
Fewer people in poorer countries get that chance. Forget the cliché of Brazilian urchins perfecting their football skills on the beach. Those are the exceptions.
Many of the world’s poor have their Olympic potential crushed before birth, by lack of nutrition. And try going around a big Brazilian, Indian or African city looking for places to play. The authorities rarely provide them.
The most successful poorer countries at the Paris Games, such as Kenya, Ethiopia and Jamaica, mostly compete for medals in a few running events — the cheapest sports to become good at. It’s no coincidence that China won little before its economy took off and has been climbing the Olympic medals table ever since.
In short, those French fans cheering on Marchand were also cheering for something bigger. He swims in a winning society.
Written by: Simon Kuper
© Financial Times
