This week’s Deloitte’s economic briefing has taken a different path, looking at the ‘cost’ of an Olympic gold medal and how Australia compares:
Australia has been punching above its weight on this front [gold medals] for some time, and certainly since the success at the Sydney Olympics, where investments in Australian sport beginning in the 1980s finally delivered results. Overall, Australian athletes have taken home more than two-and-a-half times the number of gold medals from Sydney (2000) to Rio (2016) than in the games between Montreal (1976) and Atlanta (1996).
On a population weighted basis, Australia’s gold medal performance is significant. But population levels are not necessarily a good predictor of gold medal performance. More important is money. Other things equal, rich nations will have relatively more people with the ‘leisure’ time to pursue sport at an elite level, and the resources to support them.