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Olympic Medal Prediction Model
bettiwettiwoo writes "Slate reports that PricewaterhouseCooper claims to have devised a model predicting the final medal tally for nations competing in the Olympic Games. GDP is of particular importance in bringing home the bacon, closely followed by population size and and past performance. Other factors can also affect the outcome: hosting the games usually gives a medal boost. With the possible exception of China, the titan nations of the games (US, Russia, China and Germany) are predicted to see a successive drop in their total medal tally in the future (and compared to the Sydney Games, the future starts now). So if you were wondering why the Iraqi soccer team seems on its way to the quarter finals, why Greece takes gold in synchronized diving, or why Michael Phelps has to eat Ian Thorpe's bubbles, don't worry: it's only evolution, baby, and it's all perfectly predictable!"
Ukraine is not doing too badly, thank you very much. Not for the third poorest country in Europe anyway.
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
In a similar exercise, a pair of business professors have predicteding the final Olympic medal count using socio-economic data rather than athletic performance. Andrew Bernard and Meghan Busse developed their methodology using four factors: population, per capita income, past performance, and a host effect.
They were 96% accurate in their predictions for the 2000 Games, including correctly guessing 97 total and 37 gold medals for the USA. Also discussed is why some countries, such as Australia, surpass expectations while others, particularly Canada and Japan, underperform relative to countries with similar populations/national income.
This year's predicted winners? The USA (93), Russia (83) and China (57). The full paper was published in the Feb 2004 Review of Economics and Statistics - summary here.
When you have nothing left to burn you must set yourself on fire
After reading your comment I did a quick search in Google News and found this article.4 21036.htm?1c
http://www.mercurynews.com/mld/mercurynews/news/9
The ironic thing about the article is it recommends DC field a basketball team.
Also, if you want more information on Puerto Rico you can go to this link.
http://www.wordiq.com/definition/Puerto_Rico
[SIG] Far better to be thought a fool then to post on
Fortunately, with USADA, this looks like it might change.
See this or this for examples.
PS : Hockey is not governed by US Athletics, which is, unsurprisingly, concened with Athletics.
Athletic Scholarships to universities make as much sense as academic scholarships to sports teams.
Why does Puerto Rico have its own Olympic team?
Maybe because it's self-governing? Sport seems odd like that: for most events (not the Olympics, but most -all? - others) the UK does not compete: England, Scotland and Wales do instead (and Northern Irish athletes compete with Ireland).
Sport's wierd like that. My advice is to pick just one sport (I picked Women's Beach Volleyball) and stick with it, ignoring all the other nonsense sports fans are supposed to participate in (except maybe drinking beer. Beer's OK.)
This is where the serious fun begins.
The model is used to quantify which of these effects is most powerful. You can't do that by blind conjecture. Perhaps the study found that some of these variables weren't even as important as once thought. You never know unless you do the research.
Perhaps I can answer your question.
Puerto Rico is not part of the USA, it belongs to the USA. It was given to the USA by Spain in 1898 afted its defeat in the Spanish American War.
Although its constitution names it a Comonwealth, it is actually a colony, a territory with some form of limited local government. Puerto Ricans are US citizens, and use the Dolar as a currency. We must abide by the American governmet, yet we cannot vote for the President or have representation in the Senate or in the Congress.
So there you have it, Puerto Rico is not part of the USA, it is an american territory.
On a related issue. About the future status of the island. 47% of the voters want statehood, 47% want to preserve the status quo and the remaining 6% want its independence. As you can infer from these numbers, the matters of status are actively debated on a daily basis, yet, no change seems posible in the near future.
Cheers,
Adolfo
And the same thing could be done for almost any country.
Many of those are accusations, and while some are probably true, we can do the same thing for almost any country. Let's start a list, shall we?
England
England again (the world champ 100m sprinter... no!)
Germany
Ireland
Russia
Turkey!
How multicultural! Those took me about 5 minutes to find.
Have a good day
I've just signed legislation that'll outlaw Russia forever. We'll begin bombing in five minutes.
is that the guy in a blue tutu jumped in the pool BEFORE the medal-favourites flopped...
0 8/ 17/Sports/athens-security040817.html?print
I bolded the interesting paragraphs.
http://www.cbc.ca/story/olympics/national/2004/
Olympic organizers boost security after Canadian fan leaps into pool
Last Updated Tue, 17 Aug 2004 09:16:11 EDT
CBC SPORTS ONLINE - Olympics organizers have increased security at all sports venues after an unidentified Canadian spectator plunged into a swimming pool during a diving competition.
The man, bare-chested and sporting a blue tutu, scampered onto the pool deck and climbed to an adjoining diving board during the men's synchronized three-metre springboard event on Monday.
He jumped into the pool after about a minute atop his perch and was immediately apprehended by security officials at the Olympic Aquatic Centre.
The man, who was not identified by police, was arrested and questioned by a prosecutor.
Although the spectator appeared to have harmless intentions, Olympic officials took the breach seriously.
Organizers have spent an unprecedented amount on Olympic security and the incident exposed a hole in the supposed impenetrable safety ring at venues.
"We are going to put security guys around the field of play," Marton Simitsek, an Athens 2004 executive, told the Associated Press on Tuesday.
Olympic organizers said the man was trying to send a love message to his wife by getting on TV.
However, the message painted on his chest appeared to be the website address for an online gaming website.
The fan disruption turned the competition on its head.
The top-ranked Chinese duo Kenan Wang and Bo Peng appeared headed toward certain victory before the intrusion. However, after the incident, one of the Chinese divers landed on his back on his final dive and the team received zeros across the board.
Russian Dmitry Sautin then knocked himself on the board and American brothers Justin and Tony Dumais worked themselves out of a medal position with a missed landing.
Unheralded Greeks Nikolaos Siranidis and Thomas Bimis won the gold. It was the host country's first gold of the Games.
with files from The Associated Press
Unsurprisingly, this led to a massive conflict of interest, and the US dope testing becoming something of a laughing stock. Don't believe me? Then don't take my word for it. Here's what Dick Pound of the World Anti-Doping Authority has to say :
Athletic Scholarships to universities make as much sense as academic scholarships to sports teams.
Required reading:
Diamond, Jared: "Guns, Germs & Steel"
THIS SPACE INTENTIONALLY LEFT BLANK.
Technically the kick he did was illegal. It was a dolphin type kick that's not allowed in the breast stroke event. Only the "breast-stroke-type" kick (sort of like a frog kick) is allowed in the event. When I was watching it I noticed it, and then the commentators immediately started talking about it, even before the race was over. The kick gave him that extra half-second lead (since he was losing at the end of the first leg and thats when he did his kick to inch ahead of the American).
It was unfair and probably would've been called correctly if the judges had underwater cameras like the TV viewing audience.
-- D3X
Ciao
Here is another paper published in the Review of Economics and Statistics, claiming to predict Olympic performance in Athens. The predictive factors are similar but they get very different results, mainly the drop in medals for the top countries is definetely not as large. Model was devised by two B-School professors who started doing it for Sydney 2000 with very good results.
Very true although in the case of hockey you also need to consider that the course of American hockey has been largely influenced by Canadian talent. Canada still supplies the most players to the NHL as well as many top coaches and consultants. In fact some American super stars and top coaches are either Canadian immigrants or first generation Americans born to Canadian immigrants. It doesn't make them any less American but it's no different than the way so many countries develop their talent under superior American programs and then claim the gold for themselves.
But the opposite is also true. In 1996 Canada sent a traditional fast skating, high scoring team to the World Cup while the U.S. sent a heavier defensive team - and took home the gold. It was a superior strategy that changed the course of the game even in Canada. Every team we've submitted since has been more defensive in nature.
Integrating hockey training programs between the two nations has borne superior results. It's great to see people work together to increase the quality of international athletics.
You're confusing supplements with performance enhancing "drugs" or other controlled substances. Virtually everything that you can buy from a (legitimate) heath food shop, gym or online are "supplements" which are exactly that, they supplement real food and are basically nothing more than powdered/liquid food in a filtered/concentrated form. Either that or they are mild stimulants, such as caffeine or ephedra. There are strict guidelines about the permitted levels of stimulants in competition for most high level sports these days. However, nowhere will you ever see anything pertaining to levels of basic macronutriencs or essential vitamins and minerals.
Supplements don't do anything more than eating similar macronutrient proportions of real food would do, they are simply more convenient for atheletes on very controlled diets, particularly when it comes to consuming large amounts of protein without the saturated fats.
Virtually all quality protein powder's are extracted from whey (milk), and in some cases soy, they are not synthetic. Things like Creatine, L-Glutamine, Omega3 EFA etc are all present in regular foods such as red meat, wheat and flaxseeds respectively. Consuming them in concentrated form is a matter of convenience, and in no way constitutes "cheating". It's no different from juicing an orange or drinking reduced fat milk, you are removing undesired elements from an otherwise natural food source.
Using food supplement products, observing a controlled diet and using precisely monitored training techniques doesn't mean an athlete isn't competing "naturally", nore are they using performance enhancing substances. They are maximising their performance, but it is not being artificially enhanced by a controlled substance.
If any of these supplement products on the market actually exhibited true drug like effects, which are almost always accompanied with drug like side effects, they would be pulled off the shelves by the FDA and be required to be sold by prescription only, as has happened in the past with such products as Triax. Such results would also attact the attention of the respective sporting bodies and the substance would become listed as a banned substance as a result.
The true performance enhancing drugs, such as anabolic steroids, are those that are not generally present in regular food products, and produce an elevated anabolic (muscle buidling) or altered metabolic state that boosts the subjects performance and development. This can be due to increased levels of insulin, testosterone, human growth hormone or altered levels of IGF-I and MGF in an atheletes muscle tissue, or any number of other "benefits".
The point is that the performance enhancing "drugs" result in significant chemical and behavoural changes uninitiated by the body, and usually similarly significant side effects if taken for long enough or in large enough doses. More importantly they are generally controlled substances that must be sold through specific channels and not something that you will find on the shelves at your local supermarket. Where as supplements are mostly macronutrients, vitamins and minerals extracted from natural food in a more convenient form.
A previous poster indicated that the greater the "wealth", the more advanced the potential for doping is likely to be, which is exactly right. For example, a compound such as Mechano Growth Factor (MGF) is extremely difficult and expensive to manufacture, in fact very few people in the world know how to do it.
However the substance itself is the holy grail of performance enhancing drugs as it is the body's trigger to muscle tissue growth, is currently virtually impossible to detect because it's naturally occuring in the body, and localised to muscle tissue not the circulatory system. A country unscrupulous enough to invest the necessary research and development into the production of such a compound would have a competitive "doping" advantage over other countries using currently available substances and masking agents.