Countries that suck the most at the Winter Olympics
I had a different newsletter scheduled for this week, and frankly I’m pretty excited for it, but I realized at the last second that I was really missing an opportunity by not diving into some Olympic data. Wikipedia is a font of Olympic data. The page on medals alone had 15 tables to scrape. I could go a lot of different places with this one. But since it’s the Winter Olympics and the US has been unusually underperforming in the medal count so far, I thought I’d look into some of the countries that have historically sucked a lot more at the Winter Olympics.
The Summer and Winter Olympics are not set up for apple to apples comparisons. There have been 5 more Summer Olympics than Winter Olympics, and there are about three times as many medal events in the Summer Olympics than the Winter ones. The events change a little every time, but the 2020 Summer competition had 339 medal events (so 1,017 medals up for grabs) and the 2022 Winter events count 109, for a total of 327 medals to be won. A total of 16,784 Summer medals and 3,171 Winter medals have been awarded during the modern age. This means we can’t just say “Oh, this country has won 80% more medals in the Summer than the Winter events and therefore sucks at the Winter Olympics.” We must go deeper…
Before I go any further, I do want to take a moment to scold 20th century politics and wars and all of that, because it really makes things hard to compare when countries are splitting up and joining together so much. Like, what am I supposed to do with all the Germanies? And don’t even get me started on the Eastern Bloc, you know?
Moving on, I tried doing different ratios: medals to games, medals to medals, games to games. I tried normalizing the number of medals per game, but that didn’t make a difference at all. What I kept finding is that, other than countries who had won zero medals in the Winter games, some of the biggest ratios and such came from some of the heaviest hitters in the games. For example, the five leading cumulative medal winners of the modern era (United States, Soviet Union, Great Britain, Germany, and France all had won at least 75% of their medals in the Summer Olympics. The outliers in the top 20 medal winners were Austria and Norway, both of whom have only won about 30% of their medals from the Summer games. But this doesn’t tell us much about who disproportionately sucks at the Winter games because, for example, even though the US has won nearly 90% of their medals in the Summer games, they are still the second winningest country in the Winter games.
All of this to say that, while I probably could have done this several other ways, I decided to look at those countries that have won absolutely zero medals in the Winter games, and see who we can say sucks the most. There are two metrics I’m going to look at for this exploration:
Worst differential
Here, we’re ranking by the Summer to Winter medal differential. This lets us see countries that clearly have the sporting infrastructure to meet the IOC’s qualifications, but lack the skill to win in the Winter. And I don’t want to hear about how “there’s no snow, how could they blah blah blah” because I watched Cool Runnings approximately 83 times between when we got cable in 1999 and when I became too cool to watch movies on Disney Channel in 2004.
Anyway, based on the differentials, I can comfortably say that Cuba is the most sucktastic country in the Winter Olympics. They have won 235 medals in the Summer games to a resounding zero (0) medals in the Winter games. They are followed in the top five by Brazil, Greece, Kenya, and Turkey. Here we can take a look at the top 15 biggest losers in the Winter Olympics:
The top 15 biggest losers have won a total of 1,346 medals in the Summer games and absolutely none in the Winter games. The 127 IOC-designated countries to never win a Winter Olympic medal have won a total of 2,127 medals in the Summer games. That’s pretty losery, if I do say so myself.
Most failures
Now I will acknowledge that it’s not fair to count someone as a failure if they never tried. For example: I have a nearly-finished manuscript that I could send out to query potential agents and start the process toward maybe someday actually publishing a book. However, I have found by never quite finishing the manuscript, I never have to query the agents, and therefore never have to face rejection, and voilà! No losing! Because I never tried! How’s that for motivational?
So to really get a picture of the number of countries that have truly lost the most, I think it’s more important to look at how many times they’ve tried. I don’t have the data on how many athletes or events each game might include. That’s a lot more work to track down than frankly I’m willing to do for this silly little newsletter. So each count of a “try” could represent one athlete in one event, or 50 athletes in different events, or a team event. Regardless, they all represent losers.
This rearranges our list quite a bit. For one thing, Cuba has never tried to compete in the Winter games and has therefore never lost in them either. However it also brings up some countries to the top who just really kind of suck all around. Take Iceland. They have competed in 21 Summer games and 18 Winter games, for a total of 4 medals. I attribute this to the fact that Iceland is ranked among the top 5 happiest countries, and the top 10 in the Social Progress Index (more on this in a few weeks) and therefore they are all too busy being happy and enjoying universal healthcare, comfy sweaters, and svið to be sullying their time with hyper-competitive global athletic showcases. And frankly, good for them.
I included 16 countries here, since Mexico and Lithuania are tied for that last spot in the top 15, but here we have an impressive list of countries who have taken that whole “If at first you don’t succeed” adage to heart as many as 19 times. Some other notable losers on this list include Lebanon, who have competed in 35 Summer and Winter games for a total of 4 medals, Andorra, with 0 medals in a cumulative 24 games, Monaco, with no medals over 31 games, and Cyprus, with one medal in 22 games.
In conclusion, dear readers, you and I may not be Olympians, we may be watching the games on our couch that has started to take our shape, we may be entering the third year straight of saying “I will definitely exercise tomorrow.” But take solace in the fact that you have not tried and failed to win an Olympic medal 31 times in the modern age like Monaco.
If you want to explore the data yourself, you can see it in this spreadsheet.