Who won the Olympics?



It might be tempting to say that it was the United States of America, the only country to bring home medals in the triple digits.

The United States also dominated entire events;



Michael Phelps secured his status as the most successful athlete of the Games for the fourth Olympics in a row.



Simone Biles became the most decorated American gymnast ever and is now being called by many the greatest Gymnast of all time.



In terms of medal count, China came in behind the US with 70 followed by Great Britain and the Russian Federation with 67 and 56 respectively.

It’s obvious that bigger countries dominate the Olympic Games. Larger countries have larger populations to draw athletes from.

A more fair way of measuring Olympic success is to look at the amount of medals won by a country per capita.

Per capita ranking paints an entirely different picture, here are the top four countries in terms of medal count compared with Trinidad and Tobago for context;

COUNTRY POPULATION POP. PER MEDALS Great Britain – 19th 65,138,232 972,212 Trinidad and Tobago – 28th 1,360,088 1,360,088 Russian Federation – 42nd 144,096,812 2,573,157 United States – 43rd 321,418,820 2,656,353 China – 76th 1,371,220,000 19,588,857

A per capita ranking considerably changes the ranking!

Here are the countries that won the most medals per capita at the Rio 2016 Olympics;

COUNTRY POPULATION POP. PER MEDALS Grenada – 1st 106,825 106,825 Bahamas – 2nd 388,019 194,009 Jamaica – 3rd 2,725,941 247,812

Caribbean countries can definitely be considered to be the top performers at these Olympic Games, and it’s nothing new;



At the London Games, the top three places were held by Grenada in first, followed by Jamaica and Trinidad and Tobago respectively.



The Bahamas came in at fifth, barely beat by New Zealand.

Jamaica and Bahamas held top spots at the 2008 games in Beijing, and Bahamas and Cuba held top spots four years before at Sydney.

Get more information on Olympics rankings at MedalsPerCapita.com





Images via wikipedia and @kristihollywood