The Winter Olympics are inherently unequal. Most of the sports require cold weather (or, at least, easy access to it), as well as snow. There may be lugers from India, but they don’t win. There are a hundred and ninety-six countries in the world, and since the 1994 Games only thirty-one of them have won a medal.

Within that group, there are further inequalities. Some of the winning countries are poor; others are rich. We looked at the Winter Games from 1994 to 2010 to see how a country’s wealth correlated with Olympic glory. The interactive chart above shows the per-capita G.D.P. of countries that won medals in the fifteen disciplines of this year’s games. (It also looks at GINI coefficients, but more on that later). For the purposes of our calculation, we multiplied each country’s per-capita G.D.P. by the number of medals it won in a given sport, summed the results, and divided by the total number of medals.

The “richest” discipline, perhaps not surprisingly, is curling, with a per-capita G.D.P. of around thirty-nine thousand dollars, about the same as the wealth of the United Arab Emirates. The sport is highly specialized—it requires several pieces of esoteric and expensive equipment, including shoes, brooms, stones, and, if you’re from Norway, pants. For this reason, the easiest way to get into the sport is to join a curling club. And, of course, only certain countries have the interest, and the funds, for clubs. Canada, Switzerland, and Sweden dominate.

Close behind curling are snowboarding, ski jumping, and bobsledding, which are also dominated by rich countries. The United States has won a third of the medals in snowboarding since its inception, at the 1998 games, more than twice as many as the second-most-successful nation, Switzerland. Most of those U.S. medals have been in the halfpipe, which requires a pricey snowboard and access to an alpine center. Ski jumping has been the domain of Austria, Norway, and Germany. And Germany is to bobsledding what the United States is to snowboarding: they’ve won the most medals by far, and, not coincidentally, they have more competitive sliding centers than any other country.

What about the “poorer” disciplines? “Poor” is a bit of a misnomer here—figure skating has a per-capita G.D.P. per medal won of about eighteen thousand five hundred dollars (comparable to Trinidad and Tobago), but that’s still higher than the per-capita G.D.P. of more than half of the world’s nations. Nonetheless, when it comes to the Winter Games, figure skating is at the bottom. The sport looks and sounds fancy, from the costumes to the names of the jumps. But ice rinks are fairly common winter facilities—ponds work, too—and skates are reasonably affordable compared to skis, snowboards, and curling stones. In recent history, countries with relatively low per-capita G.D.P.s have done well in figure skating—particularly Russia and China. The same is true of another skating discipline, short-track speed skating, where South Korea and China have done particularly well.

The above chart also looks at the average GINI coefficient per medal won. GINI is a measure of income distribution—the closer the number is to zero, the more equal the country is, and vice versa. What we see here is essentially the opposite of the per-capita G.D.P. rankings. Poorer countries may do better at figure skating and short-track skating, but they’re also more unequal places. Meanwhile, the most equal countries in the world are Scandinavian, and events they excel at, such as ski jumping and Nordic combined, have the lowest GINIs.

In case you’re wondering, the Summer Olympics, which have many more events and draw a wider range of countries, also have a wider range of G.D.P. and GINI figures. It will come as no shock that the richest discipline, equestrian, outpaces the poorest, weight lifting, in per-capita G.D.P. by a factor of five.