I also took the coldest temperature, and multiplied it by the amount of precipitation each country receives. This is intended to give some indication of how likely, and how much snow a country might have. Again we see a pretty clear downward trend, with a correlation of -0.54, meaning that countries which are colder and receive more precipitation win more Winter Olympic medals.

I also looked at the geography of the countries and found a 0.24 correlation between the highest point of a country and the number of medals won. There was also a 0.22 correlation between the latitude of a country (taken at the capital city) and the number of medals won. These are both pretty weak correlations, but are in the direction you’d expect, i.e. having higher mountains and being more northern help you win more medals. (Although of course there are plenty of events that don’t take place on mountains)

Next I wanted to look at the sporting culture of a country. This is pretty much impossible to quantify, so I took two readily-available measures of sporting ability to see if there was any relationship to the number of Winter Olympic medals won. I used the number of medals won during the 2016 Summer Olympics and the current FIFA World Rankings. The Olympic relationship should be pretty clear, but I though it would be interesting to see the effect of footballing ability — would it encourage more general sporting ability, or channel all that ability into only one sport?