Have you tried
Swivel Business?

Beijing Olympics 2008: Total Medals by GDP

By seancarmody on Aug 21, 2008
Viewed 4498 times

Graph Table Map Absolute Relative More Options

Type	Vertical Scale	Sort	Data Aggregation
Bar Horizontal Bar Scatter Line Pie Other Views Table	Absolute Relative to Average Relative to Range	Highest Lowest Alphabetical	Average High Low Total Count Distinct None

Sources: Official Olympic Site, World Bank, Wikipedia, CIA Factbook

For almost two weeks now I've been regularly updating my Beijing 2008 Olympic Medal Count data set. The tally chart has proved very popular and is heading towards 10,000 views, so I thought I'd add another slant to the data by looking at the results in terms of the size of each country's population or economy.

So, I tracked down some population data on wikipedia, correcting a few of the figures with reference to the CIA World Factbook (I'd have taken it all from there if I could work out an easy way to download all the data). I found world gross domestic product (GDP) data provided by the world bank, and uploaded the results to Swivel.

At the time of writing, Jamaica is top in the ranking of medals per capita and second in terms of medals per trillion dollars of GDP. It would be first if Zimbabwe's economy wasn't such a basket case! So, in the adjusted Olympic medal tally, I'd nominate Jamaica as the clear winner. For more charts and more discussion, read this blog post.

Note that the GDP data is in US dollars. Also, if you hover your cursor over the dots, you'll see that the country name is displayed. For example, the dot up in the top right is the USA (they haven't done so well given the size of their economy). and the other high dot is China.

—seancarmody