Not surprisingly, Carl Bialik's got a good analysis of China's staggering gold medal haul so far in Beijing. The country has won 57 percent of all gold medals, which looks to be just the fourth time in history that a country has won more than 50 percent of all golds (we'll see if this holds up through track & field though...).
The other story is the Russians, and their lack of dominance. They're fourth in total medals, and way behind on golds. What happened to the traditional athletics powerhouse?
I think the WSJ blog post on this have taken the idea a bit farther and done some theorizing. It is truly odd how China's performance is heavily weighted towards gold. Perhaps it says something about how athletes are selected and then trained. This is at risk of being highly generalized but perhaps in the US basically everyone is funding themselves, thus even second best is pushing forward with all the resources he or she can muster. Again with huge risk of over generalizing, let me at least put it out there that perhaps the Chinese team has a system where resources have been focused on the leading players, while the second best left lacking. And i'm guessing its likely harder to be self funded as a Chinese athlete. I actually was thinking it would be interesting if someone went in detail on exactly how olympic athletes fund themselves in different countries. Its a huge commitment, and requires substantial money (imagine the opportunity cost from not getting further educated, or working more). I'm sure the route to becoming an olympic athlete is quite different in different countries.
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