Shock news - Jamaica tops gold medal table for Rio Olympics with TeamGB finishing seventh.

Jamaica tops the table, Team GB finish seventh with China in last place.

Analysis of the top 21 gold medal winning countries by www.EconomicsRevealed.co.uk reveals that once the gold medal places are re-adjusted in order to take into account the relative size of each country then Jamaica becomes the clear winner with 1 gold medal per 500,000 citizens.

The surprise result sees Croatia finishing second in the table with 1 gold medal per 800,000 citizens and Hungary finishing third with 1 gold medal per 1.3 million citizens.

New Zealanders will be excited to find themselves in joint third place, also with 1 gold medal per 1.3 million citizens.

In a disappointing result, China find itself at number 21 in the top 21 countries with 1 medal per 53.8 million citizens.

Economist, Nick Langston-Able (Associate Lecturer at a leading UK university) who carried out the research commented:

"It is fascinating to look at how the gold medal performance of different countries changes once you take into account the relative populations of those countries.

"Jamaica has performed brilliantly- for every 500,000 people in Jamaica there is a gold medal winner.

"The performance of China, with its population of 1.4 billion looks less impressive with a gold medal winner for every 53.8 million people.

"If population and gold medals were directly linked then China should have one over 100 times more gold medals than Jamaica did and around 20 times more than Team GB did.

"So Team GB can still be very proud but I would imagine the Kiwis will take some satisfaction from this result!"

Countries with relatively large populations which did not feature in this table and so have very much under-performed include India, Mexico, Indonesia and Turkey.


Here are the full results of the top 21 gold medal winning countries when adjusted for population size:

Country	Gold Medals	Population (millions)	Population per medal (millions)
Jamaica	6	3	0.5
Croatia	5	4	0.8
New Zealand	4	5	1.3
Hungary	8	10	1.3
Netherlands	8	17	2.1
Cuba	5	11	2.2
GB	27	65	2.4
Australia	8	24	3.0
Germany	17	82	4.8
South Korea	9	51	5.7
France	10	65	6.5
Spain	7	46	6.6
USA	46	324	7.0
Kenya	6	44	7.3
Italy	8	61	7.6
Russia	19	147	7.7
Uzbekistan	4	32	8.0
Canada	4	37	9.3
Japan	12	127	10.6
Brazil	7	207	29.6
China	26	1,400	53.8

Further analysis has also been done looking at gold medal performance in comparison to the size of each country's GDP (Gross Domestic Product - the amount each country produces in a year and a common measurement of the economic size of a country).  See here.