My totally fair and unbiased population-adjusted medal count has been causing quite the stir. I’ve let a few of the comments go live, but a few were - well, lets just say not in the spirit of the games.

Some a lot smarter and faster than myself, has beat me to doing a GDP/population based analysis, which you can see here.

I think the most informative calculation is the medal-type-adjusted (ie. silver = 1/2 gold), GDP and population adjusted ranking, which today has North Korea in the lead. This makes sense as all medals aren’t created equal, and there is a huge range of GDPs, not necessarily correlating with population.

I’ve created another graph of this data, which you can click on below to enlarge.

Australia seems to have dropped somewhat in the ranking using this scale. But we’re still way ahead of New Zealand and The Netherlands.

[Source: http://www.billmitchell.org/sport/medal_tally_2008]