1. Total Medal Counts, by Country

Country summaries: Total medals won

(Note: the following analyses treat duplicate medals earned in team or partner events as a single medal. See code for details.)

Spotlight on countries’ conversion rates:

2. Medal Counts adjusted by Population, GDP

I created three rankings of total gold medals each country won across all years of competition:

  1. Overall gold medals (unadjusted)
  2. Gold medals adjusted by country population (rescaled to millions of residents)
  3. Gold Medals adjusted by GDP per capita (measured as US $1,000 per resident)

The results are fairly consistent at the high end of the rankings, and bode especially well for Germany, which is either first or second in each ranking; similarly, Norway is either second or third in each. Russia does not look as victorious when its large population is accounted for – it actually falls out of the top 10 entirely.

3. Host Country Advantage

Only two countries have hosted the Winter Games more than twice: the U.S. and France. Below are visualizations of all medals won by those countries’ teams across the years, highlighting the years in which they hosted the Games.

USA

With the exception of the 1960 Squaw Valley Games, it does seem that Team USA won its most medals when it was hosting.

France

The picture is more mixed for France: it had the advantage (or disadvantage) of being the guinea pig for all future Winter Olympic Games in 1924 (Chamonix), where it performed quite poorly. France has hosted three times – second only to the U.S. – but only its performance at Albertville in 1992 seemed to benefit from a home advantage. Fortunately, they’ve been steadily improving since 2006.

4. Country success by sport / discipline / event

Below is a plot of all countries that have ever medaled in speed skating. Norway and the Netherlands clearly lead the pack, followed by Russia and the United States.

5. Most successful athletes

I created plots of the athletes with the most gold medals to their names, for both men and women. Certain countries clearly dominate (Norway on the men’s side and Russia on the women’s).

6. Interactive graphics

7. Data Table

Below is an interactive DataTable containing information on the number of gold medals each athlete won over all years of competition.