Predicting the 2024 Paris Olympics medal count: 7 key factors for top winning countries

According to the International Olympic Committee, “there are no countries participating in the Olympic Games.” There are “athletes from national Olympic committees.”

That’s as silly as a 9.2 from the Russian judge, and not just because the Olympics are flooded with national flags, colors, uniforms and anthems. Fans, athletes and national committees all recognize participation in the Olympics as a supreme expression of national pride. And the most basic measure of success in competition against other countries is winning a bunch of medals. While never officially recognized by the IOC, national medal counts date back to 1908, and medal standings have been a staple of the Olympic experience for decades.

And here’s the secret about Olympic medal rankings: You don’t actually need to know a whole lot about sports to predict them. Here, we will explain why and develop a medal projection system of our own that reveals what’s behind various countries’ Olympic quests.

Sure, one way to predict medal counts would be to go through each of the 329 events that the Paris Olympics will feature and, for each one, figure out which athletes are positioned to do well given their recent performances, age, health and any other factors you think are important. Then you could add up your predictions for top-three results across all sports, and you’d get a forecast for the overall medal standings.

But that would be like projecting the results of a baseball season by predicting the result of every game played by each team, 1 through 162, before the start of a season. It would involve massive uncertainty and, frankly, a whole lot of unnecessary work. At least since 2010, Olympic forecasts, whatever their inputs, have generally made similar predictions. That’s because many of the variables they use – large-scale data, world championships, expert opinion – are correlated with one another. They are all partial measures of the same thing: a country’s capacity to crank out elite athletic performance.

A better approach? Analyzing medal count through a socioeconomic lens.

Population and equal access

Olympic competitions are as high-stakes as sports get, and in many nations, the process of developing potential champions has become extraordinarily expensive and professionalized, if not industrialized. So much so that for a while, it’s been possible to use macro-level socioeconomic data to see how nations produce medalists, the same way you might study how they churn out cars or semiconductors. Back in 2004, economists Andrew Bernard and Meghan Busse wrote: “…both a large population and high per capita GDP [gross domestic product] are needed to generate high medal totals.”

It turns out that in addition to size and wealth, inequality in health outcomes matters in this equation, particularly taking care of mothers and babies. Inequality data is a proxy for how well a country takes care of its citizens, and health and safety obviously matter greatly in achieving any form of success. So our model begins with those three basic national stats: population, per-capita GDP and an estimate of healthcare inequality.

Home-country advantage

You can predict the order of how countries will medal fairly well with just those few factors, but it’s worth running through several more that also drive winning. For one thing, home-country advantage looms large at the Olympics. Host countries see a surge of about 50 percent in the share of medals they win, compared with preceding and succeeding Olympics. And that’s only partly because of easier logistics and rabidly supportive crowds.

Host countries are automatically granted entry to team sports and face lower qualification requirements for many individual sports, too. As a result, they send much larger contingents to their own games. From 1952 to 2012, host nations had an average of 176 more athletes participating than they did in the previous Olympics, according to research by FiveThirtyEight.

Since 2016, the IOC has also allowed host country organizing committees to pitch new events for the Games they are planning. Lo and behold, karate, skateboarding, sports climbing and surfing – all highly popular in Japan – debuted at the Tokyo Olympics three years ago, and Japan won more medals in each of those sports than any other nation. The Tokyo Games also brought baseball and softball back to the Olympics for the first time since 2008, and Japan won gold in each of those, too. You heard it here first: In Paris, keep an eye on Danis Civil (“B-Boy Dany Dann”) and Sya Dembélé (“B-Girl Syssy”), French competitors in the new Olympic sport of breaking.

Multi-medal sports

Another key to outsized success: If you’re a nation that excels at sports where the Olympics happen to offer a lot of medals, your yield will grow. Because Olympic sports have all kinds of team sizes, event distances and weight classes, they hand out widely different numbers of medals. The Tokyo Games, for example, awarded 32 medals among 128 fighters in taekwondo, an individual sport that gives two bronze medals in every event. Meanwhile, just six medals were up for grabs for field hockey, a team sport in which nearly 400 athletes participated. And overall, Australia finished seventh in the Tokyo medal count largely because Australians won 21 of the 111 medals in swimming, second only to the United States. The Netherlands placed eighth; 12 of the 36 medals earned by Dutch athletes were in medal-heavy cycling.

State sponsorship

Of course, there are nations that use the power of the state to channel resources into winning at the Olympics, sometimes investing heavily in particular sports where opportunities seem ripe. During the Cold War, the Soviet Union and its allies were fairly obsessed with winning a large share of Olympic medals, and they succeeded in doing so. And today, China and Russia remain dictatorships committed to directing the spending, recruiting and “training” it takes to produce medalists.

Dealing with outliers

We decided to handle all of these factors in one fell swoop in our statistical model. If a country wins more (or fewer) medals than it “should,” given its population, wealth and inequality, we simply count their surplus winnings as a factor in their favor (or against them) in our model for the next Olympic year. We don’t need to know the reasons for last time’s medal haul – we can debate those in bars and comment sections. We just need to know that some particular countries have a tendency to do better (or worse) than a first cut at the numbers suggests, so we can incorporate that information into the second cut.

Thus, we are predicting every nation’s share of medals based on its population, wealth, inequality and tendency to over- or underperform its socioeconomic data in recent Olympics.

Medal projections by country

Projections based on the set of all countries that have won at least one Olympic medal since 2004 and for which population, economic and inequality statistics are available, and on an estimate of 1,011 medals being awarded at the Paris Games. The list below only has countries projected to win more than 15 medals.

Nation Total medals

United States 110

China 86

Great Britain 63

France 50

Australia 46

Italy 40

Japan 38

Germany 38

Netherlands 36

Canada 25

Brazil 22

Republic of Korea 21

New Zealand 20

Hungary 20

Ukraine 19

Spain 18

This model won’t explain everything. (And who would want it to?) We are still trying to figure out why India, with a population of more than 1.4 billion, won fewer medals at the last Olympics than the country of Georgia, which has about one-third as many people as the state of Georgia. And how the Dominican Republic, which our model suggests shouldn’t have been in line to win any medals in Tokyo, earned five.

But even this model, with its focus on faceless factors, is pretty good. It thought the U.S. would finish atop the 2021 standings and win 122 medals – the Americans did lead the pack and actually won 113. It correctly picked nine of the top 10 medal-winning countries. So when you do see a surprise medalist or out-of-nowhere winner in Paris, take an extra beat to appreciate them. The forces working to mint medal winners are vast, and for any underdog to overcome them and upset the medal count at least a little – well, that’s special indeed.