I'm sure you considered this but: Wouldn't it be the case that with fewer people (because it is just one country) there is more _impact_ when someone gets gold? That is, they can't _also_ get silver and bronze?
This probably has no effect on your research but tiebreakers also affect medal distribution and count. (especially for swimming) If there are two gold medalists because of a tie there will not be silver medalist. The next athlete get awarded a bronze. If there is a tie in the silver medal position there is no bronze medal given. The next athlete is awarded 4th place. If there is a tie in the third place and all tie breaker scenarios have been taken into account two athletes can be awarded the bronze medal. This happened in Tokyo during a gymnastics event.
Can you do an analysis on how much each country spends on training, facilities, etc. in comparison with their medals? If all countries dumped as much money into Olympic athletes as the US, I don’t think the US would win the most medals anymore
@@willtheprodigy3819each team also had a different strategy on which stroke to choose for their two men and two women which led to a very interesting race to watch
I suspect this would be a pretty straight forward phenomena to capture with a variety of methods. Fun part is there are a LOT of grad students with enough statistical background that proving this wouldn't be that crazy. may actually take someone from a stats department (or similar) to get it published though.
I have plenty of coding experience to support if someone else takes the lead lol, not volunteering to take the head on this but I am happy to run Monte Carlo sims or something if the initial idea and work progresses beyond initial concept.
I'm loving the enthusiasm in these comments. I don't have enough stats experience to lead this type of paper, but if we got a group together with at least one person with a solid stats background, I would love to be part of it ☺️
@@sharks2571 See if anyone else pipes up in the comments. I would love to read the attribution statement on a paper and see how the heck a group of authors got together, RUclips comments has to be a rare nucleolus.
I need Hank to start making Paralympics content bc there's so much cool adaptive tech on display and the broadcasters never talk about it as much as I want them to lol
I think there is another adventage for Europe with the multiple countries. For the teamsports, if America gets gold, it can not also get silver an bronze. While for Europe it is possible to have all 3 medals.
On the other hand, for individual sports, a single country can and has swept the podium before, that sort of cancels out the European advantage for team events
Good point. To eliminate this advantage when comparing USA vs "Europe", all you need to do is count only the highest place finish by a European team in any event.
Something to note is that in the history of the olympics there have been more bronze medals (7437) awarded, than silver (6933) or gold ones (6964). Some martial arts, like Judo, Boxing and Taekwondo give 2 bronze medals, so there's just more of them.
Very true. This could be it actually to some degree. As well as the double medal (both gold and bronze) possibility being much higher than that of the US limited number of athletes.
Came here to say the same thing, as I suspect this is the main reason driving this. I wonder what the stats would look like if you excluded the sports that always award two bronze medals. Unfortunately I do think this is a lot more boring of an answer than the ideas that Hank proposed but... that is sorta how the world usually is. (Judo in particular is very heavily weighted towards continental Europe.) For anyone interested in exploring this, the full list of sports that award two bronze medals are Boxing, Judo, Taekwondo, and Wrestling.
@@SayAhhCorrect. A tie for gold means no silver is awarded, only a bronze. A tie for silver means no bronze is awarded. You could make things more complicated with a tie for gold and another for bronze, to three-way ties…
I like how you say that it's not countries that win medals but individuals, but then go on to explain how a lot depends on the country to be able to win medals.
It's sadly true, there is a reason you can find top runner from Kenya, especially long distance running but there isn't any swimming champion or basketball or whatever, having the potential to become a champion is one thing, having the infrastructure to develop that potential into making you a top level contender is a completely other thing. You can never take off in swimming if you don't have a pool to train in. Not to mention coaches.
Claiming to be disappointed and/or relieved that you didn't get to meet a spy might be the sort of thing a spy would do if they didn't want anyone to suspect...
Hank, I am not sure if you came across the fact that several events in the Olympics involve Semi-final matches before the final to decide the medalists. And numerous ones don't actually do a 3rd place match. They give out Bronze medals to both loosing semi-finalists. So this definitely has an impact on total Bronze medal winning opportunities with a higher number of participants per game for Europe as a whole than individual countries I think
Wait, which sports do that? I've never seen or heard of that happening. :/ I've seen sports where there are two semi-finals, and the winners of each semi go on to the A-final, where the winner gets the gold and the loser gets the silver, and the losers of the two semis go on to the B-final where the winner gets the bronze and the loser gets fourth. (Archery does this, frex.) I've never seen nor even heard of an Olympic sport where two different competitors/countries get bronze medals as a matter of course. Examples please?
It really doesn't make sense to have people who lost a boxing match (possibly by knockout) to fight another bout. Therefore, both semi-final losers get a bronze medal.
@@angiepen boxing is the obvious one (I presume because people who lose a semi-final are quite likely to not be medically cleared to fight again in a few days)... @davidlocke3477 beat me to it by like 30 seconds...
Honestly, I don't care which country get the most medals. I am more focused on the countries that get their first gold medal. Botswana, Dominica, Guatemala, and Saint Lucia all got their first gold medals ever, with Dominica & St. Lucia being their first ever. Seeing an underdog nation win against all the odds makes me filled with joy. Although, the real winner for this Olympics are the memes.
I love seeing winners from underrepresented countries who only have a handful of participants and probably not a whole lot of support from their OC. It makes winning all the more impressive!
Carlos Yulo won the Philippines first ever gymnastics medal and first gymnastics gold medal in Paris (in floor exercise), then turned around the next day and won their second gymnastics gold medal! There were a bunch of first ever country medals in gymnastics this year, and most of them were gold medals!
@@shayelea In addition to Dominica and St. Lucia, the nations of Albania and Cabo Verde earned their first ever Olympic medal in 2024. According to Wiki, there are 64 nations* that have never received a medal, the largest of them being Bangladesh. * - Some of the "nations" at the Olympics are not fully independent.
Former swimmer here 👋 the infrastructure of USA swimming is an absolute machine in a way I didn’t see my friends experience in their respective sports. As a nation our swimming community is just really really serious
As a non-swimmer, don’t so many non-Americans train and compete here. Like the machine can’t just be cranking out solely american swimmers. Isn’t it just good swimmers from anywhere that get better training in the USA? I might be completely wrong
My sister who swims told me once that the Olympics is the second fastest swim meet in the world. The fastest swim meet in the world is the US Olympic qualifiers.
Yeah, I can’t speak to Australia’s program as I’ve never been, but clearly they are also great at producing high caliber swimmers! My sibling was there for for Worlds in the 2000s and from what I heard the pools were beautiful 😊
You know how monkeys throw their poop as a way to communicate? Well we as a species have never come up with a formal universally accepted word for that. We might as well say “discourse.”
As with all social interaction... it all depends on who you're interacting with. Curate a feed, ignore the trolls, block those who add nothing. Start with academics & journalists & you'll see far less "mudslinging" and pointlessness.
I once saw a study that showed that athletes winning bronze medals were happier that gold medal winners. The reasoning went thus: Silver is lost, gold leaves empty feeling "what next?", but bronze means that you got medal and still have something to aim for
The other reasoning would be that if you win Silver you might be tortured with thoughts of "if I only did better and got Gold...." but if you got Bronze you're more likely to think "Awesome, I placed!"
It also depends on the competition format. If you have a semi-final, a final, and a third-place play-off, then both the gold and the bronze medalists have finished their event with a winning match. And the bronze medalists went into that final match knowing that bronze was what they were fighting for.
What I've seen was gold > bronze > silver in terms of happiness. Bronze being happy they placed but Silver often feeling they that they could have just done a little more to get gold.
Hank, I’ve been a fan for a long time. But this is perhaps the first time we’ve fallen down the same rabbit hole at the same time. I just presented all my findings to my husband last night (the poor man). I have so many thoughts. But I’m so glad you shared.
Did you by any chance look at educational policies while down that rabbit hole? Belgium has had an interesting reaction to the many medals won by the Netherlands this time. If there's no Belgian medal candidate in an event, Flemish Belgium is generally speaking happy to celebrate Dutch wins. Yet this time it all got a bit much, with NL winning left right and centre, so there was also quite a lot of commentary on what caused this very noticeable difference. Relative affluence and population size can't explain all of it and sports preferences are quite similar both in team and individual events so it's not that either. Which basically only leaves direct investment in elite athletes, as well as the educational policies and slight differences in broader cultural attitudes to sports which make a difference to whether those athletes get an opportunity to rise to the top in the first place. But I haven't looked at the details of this, let alone more broadly in terms of how much of a difference this actually makes also in other cases, like Australia for example.
Running a quick numerical simulation, this effect seems to be attributable to just the country size. When we group Europe's medals together, we see an average of what happens for all these small countries. What matters is what happens in a small country on average, vs in a big country. The numerical simulation I ran is a simplification, of course, but we see this effect even more clearly than with the real data of the Olympics. I picked three types of countries, defined by their populations: Large, Medium and Small. I picked 100 events. For each event, every person in every country gets a random score between 0 and 1. Every country selects its best person, and then the countries get a medal for the event based on the scores of their champion. The Large countries got more gold than bronze. The Medium countries got more bronze than gold. And the Small countries got nothing. Easy to say after running the experiment but it's not a surprising after all. It's just because big countries have more chance to win gold, hence not bronze. To compensate, smaller countries have more chance to win bronze, since on average we need as much bronze as gold. Maybe it was mentioned in the video, or in a comment I think. Of course country size is not the only factor for the number of medals, but this seems to explain this phenomenon by itself.
I see it as bell curve of the position in events. China and USA’s mode of the curve is more around 1st or 2nd place. Europe, on average, has a mode that’s 3rd place or probably lower. For USA and China, population size is part of it but it’s also about the money being spent on sports training.
So I have a couple of theories which I think may both contribute a bit: 1) As some other comments have mentioned, lots of martial arts (boxing, taekwondo and judo definitely do this) offer 2 bronze medals, either for the losers of both semis, or in the case of taekwondo, a repackage system that allows a bronze to also be awarded to an athlete who lost to an eventual finalist early on. Places in Europe are pretty good as these sports, but not quite as good as the best such as Uzbekistan in boxing, so will win a lot of bronze given there’s twice the number on offer anyway 2) There are several sports with lots of medals on offer which other teams are historically dominant in for some reason or another, such as the US/Kenya/Jamaica in athletics, Australia/US in swimming and China in diving. With money pumped in, European countries can get amongst the medals in these, but with such dominant other countries they’re often competing for silver or bronze essentially. For example, GB has a decent medal chance in every diving event and ended with medals in 6 of 8 events, but with China sweeping every gold (and occasionally gold and silver in the individual events) it meant these medals would be most likely bronze, then silver
Just to add - even if European countries are the best at those events (not just 'good'), it could still explain the difference. If European countries made up all the semi finalists, then they would collectively get more bronze than gold or silver.
There is also the consideration that the IOC is very Euro-centric, and there are a lot of sports that are very European with long histories and followings only in Europe. The fact that they are so many European countries means that you can get a coalition of neighbors together who want to see a sport that few people outside of Europe play or even know about. For example, handball. Handball's popularity across Europe is possibly on par with baseball across the US. But it is arguably less popular across the world than baseball, when baseball has major leagues in Central America, South America, the Caribbean, Japan, Korea, Taiwan, and even Australia. But since baseball isn't popular in Europe, you don't get as many votes calling for it in the Olympics.
Yeah there’s a zero-sum thing going on with the golds: if the China “especially good at identifying elite” effect is real, they’re removing an excess of golds from the potential “pool”. (No pun intended).
Hank being very intrigued by data is refreshing because I keep accidentally infodumping to my coworkers abour Bach, and it's nice to see a kindred spirit.
I also would like to subscribe to Bach facts. Did you know his lute works weren’t really written for a lute, but rather a keyboarded instrument that sounds a lot like a lute?
I have the answer: Higher number of participants combined with KO ranking system. Assuming for simplicity that there is no randomness in the athletic performance itself, and assuming there was an unknown "true" ranking of the athletes. Under these assumptions the true best athlete should get gold. But with 10 KO rounds there are 10 people who lose against the future gold medallist. The true second best could be any one of those 10. Then the true third best is also among these first 10 losers, but also among everybody who lost to the 10 first losers. Which is an additional 55 people. Due to this KO system randomness, there is an advantage to have more people in the competition for silver and bronze.
There are more bronze medals than gold medals awarded ( in judo, wrestling, boxing and taekwendo there are 2 bronze medals). Maybe Europe is more focused on those? Or since Europe has more participants they have more opportunities to snatch the 2 bronze in those events (while with the small number of participants it would be highly unlikely for the US)
@@IlIlllIllIlIIIllNo, there were two bronze medals awarded in each wrestling event this year and has been since 2008. Boxing, Wrestling, Judo, and Taekwondo all have two bronzes, resulting in a total of 54 more Bronze medal slots than gold or silver in Paris. Due to ties there was one more silver than gold and 56 more bronzes than gold awarded for the games.
Yes, and I don't see a lot of representatives for China or the USA in combat sports in recent times. Also the 'Europe' total will be closer to the total of all medals as it wins more. No mystery, really.
@@ubertoaster99That's not entirely accurate. The US earned one medal in boxing, one medal in Tae Kwon Do, and 7 in wrestling. If you count fencing (it's technically a combat sport) that's another 4 medals.
Came here to say just this - the number of medals awarded + inherent randomness due to the sheer number of countries would together explain this well. No research paper unfortunately, Hank
Something I'd hypothesize might play a role is the pattern for other medals. If a country like China is winning a lot of gold medals, there are only so many gold medals to go around and so that reduces the number available for other countries. So it may not only be that theres something about Europe that makes them likely to get Bronze, but that other wealthy countries with fewer people in each event when compared to all of Europe have something making them win gold or silver more often, leaving bronze.
There are also just more bronze medals. In Paris it was 329 gold, 330 silver and 385 bronze! I think this is mostly because of fighting sports like judo that award a second bronze medal for the 4th place.
Also, because those sports limit the # of entry per country to 1, every event has 4 different countries winning a medal, and there's a good chance that many of those countries are going to be European.
I reject anything sports-like from my life or periphery, but this kind of theory, calculation, and discussion remind me sooo much of the discussions Eurovision analysts do every year lol
Hi Hank! The Italian media was actually discussing this, because we noticed we had the most 4th places of any country at some point during the Olympics. The final tally was 25, still ahead of any other country. As for other medals, Italy got 12 golds, 13 silvers, and 15 bronzes. Thought it might be interesting for you :)
Interesting, I'd be curious to see a country breakdown to see if most other European countries also follow that pattern like Italy does. It makes some intuitive sense to me that most would, but any country that bucks that trend would be interesting to look into!
Hank, never stop being curious. And not just the I-wonder-if-that-is-true curiosity that most of us have, but the I-bet-there's-data-on-this-I-can-find-to-determine-whether-this-is-true curiosity. The effort to create new knowledge in the world - even if it's new only to you (and us) - is lovely and admirable and, frankly, inspiring. Thank you. I need to be more like you.
Becasue you mentioned Michael Phelps having so many gold medals because there are so many more swimming events: this year Mijaín López from Cuba became the first ever athlete to win 5 straight gold medals in the same event, but because as a wrestler the events are based on weight, he can only compete in that event, so despite dominating his event in the Olympics for 20 years, he only has 5 gold medals.
Seeing an Overwatch streamer I watch be in a vlogbrothers video, and in fact being the main spark of this video because of the discourse he sparked is both hilarious and confusing Bogur's really making it big out here
Often canada is spoken of *with* the us when people say "america" But every country is getting more and more messed up so the discussion will be moot soon😑
@@LiliththelizardYou might think it's funny, but the Europeans hate you nearly as much as they hate us. You're just not as fun to draw into pointless discussions.
@@ApequHto be fair it is in Europe, the continent (division of globe, not mainland) as opposed to the European Union (organisation). It’s hard to argue the UK isn’t in Europe…
And they, too, are humans being all kinds of awesome! Some of the adaptations make for new amazing sports! I fell in love with para ice hockey (« ice sledge ») a couple of winter games ago.
Any European showing the same hunger as an American for gold and success would immediately be regarded as arrogant, egocentric and many other adjectives and some subtle sabotage would ensue, from the other members of the team even from the trainers.
I am guessing you already noticed this, but they do give out significantly more bronze medals (2 medals per gold medal) in the boxing, wrestling and Taekwondo events. Higher bronze count may also play a part in the sports that Europe focus on? Maybe?
Wrestling had a third place match this year. I don't know if they did it in years past. It seemed like they didn't because the announcers kept mentioning the wrestle-back opportunities for third.
I personally don't know much about wrestling, but if it uses the same system as judo, that makes sense. If i remember correctly, when you lose a quarter final in the Olympic judo tournament, you get another opportunity against another losing quarter finalist. The winner of that contest gets a bronze medal contest against a losing semi finalist. So the first repechage round takes 4 losing QFs, and the the 2 winners enter their own bronze medal contests against 2 losing SFs.
I mean as someone who’s technically not from a landlocked nation but the closest ocean (within my country/province) is a 24 hour straight drive, freezing and pretty desolate I concur with lakes😆 I once lived in a pretty small city that had over 300 lakes within city limits and sailing was definitely a thing on them, I’m assuming Austria must have some decent lakes for sailing😊
European here. I've seen a lot of EU medal trackers and charts out there. Particularly important for smaller nations in the EU who do feel part of sth bigger and also want to play a role in the "who wins the most olympic medals" game.
yeah my country has about 18 million people in it. extremely obvious we will never get more golds than the US. But objectively my country is way better at the olympics than the US. we got 15 golds with 18 million people. US got 40 with 330 million. That's leagues and leagues better. Not even close to the same realm.
@@yaboyJJJJJ Being "better at olympics" is a very weird sentence imo. Why did you mesure with medals / population? Why not medals / gdp? Or medals / dollar of infrastructure? Or any other similar metric?
This seems like the kind of thing that the RUclips channel Secret Base. It's at the intersection of sports, statistics and showing charts, beautiful, beautiful charts.
I appreciate that you pronounce affluent the way you do. I started hearing people say it like uh-fluent, and it gives me the icks.. but I started to question myself.
I'm relieved, nay, very pleased, to discover that, not only am I not the only one who made spreadsheets and graphs of countries in the Olympics comparing gold, silver and bronze medals, population size, gdp, gdp per capita, median income, etc, but that at least one of the OTHER people also doing it is Hank! 😃😃😃
@5:34 “This isn’t an effect of a sport having more events or a country having more people” - no Hank, it’s an effect of a continent having more countries (and therefore more individual teams in the olympics). If we assume that 3rd place is more high variance of a medal than gold (because gold goes to the best competitor, no matter how much better they are than the competition, where as bronze goes to the best middle-of-the-pack competitor), then it makes sense that a very rich continent fielding a bunch of different teams would have a better shot than any individual country of snagging that bronze position. Take the synchronized 10m diving from this year’s olympics as an example. China had gold LOCKED UP. There was no competition even close to them. Similarly, silver (North Korea) was way ahead of the pack. But the competition for Bronze was intense. 3 different countries were super close to getting Bronze and it ended up going to Great Britain. In these types of scenarios where there is a significant gap between the best competitors and the rest of the pack, you will find a huge grouping effect of scores around the 2nd-4th place range and in that scenario, Europe, with it’s many many different countries/competitors has a huge advantage for snagging Bronze.
This can probably be explained by the fact that most events have a limit on athletes that can be sent from one country. If you aggregate all Europeans, you are essentially bypassing this limit (e.g. there might be 8 athletes competing across all of Europe , whereas the USA might be limited to 3). This becomes more apparent in the bronze medal count which is subject to more variance, thereby favoring the "country" (or continent in this case) that was able to send more athletes. For a more specific example, in the qualifying round for women's all around gymnastics, USA got 3 of the 4 highest scores, but Jordan Chiles did not make it through to the final round since there was a limit of 2 athletes per country that qualified (Simone and Suni qualified). If Jordan made it to the final round, there's a decent chance she could've gotten bronze.
Its funny to watch the US x Europe discourse as someone from Brazil. We as a nation get so happy and emotional with every single podium, no matter the position, the athletes become kind of beloved celebrities across the country. There's fanart, memes, edits on tiktok, mass following... And we're not even close to the top in any configuration of the ranking lists
Specially with CazeTv bringing the Olympics to RUclips. Interactions with people in chat and organizing mass following to the athletes was definitely something that changed this year's Olympics from a Brazilian point of view. Also, their coverage on social media in general was sooo cool to see! The amount of impressions at every single post sharing that we won another medal... it didn't matter if it was gold or bronze, or which sport. I just hope that we invest more in the not so mainstream sports.
I'm not Brazilian but Rebecca Andrade moved me to tears this year. I think she won so many hearts internationally, I hope you all are feeling the love!
6:30 That's what I was going to suggest. We can check that by randomly making a group of small countries and comparing them to a large country with an (overall) similar population. Then repeat that many times with a monte carlo simulation and do that for a bunch of different years.
Now that you mention it, being able to "find about cool stuff without having to go on twitter" is a great summary of why i take in nerdfightaria content. Subscribed. (to the newsletter)
I at least know 2 majors factors contributing to this outside what you already mentioned (likely more) 1)In fighting sports(boxing/judo/wrestling/taekwando) there is double bronze. Europe is relatively scoring better in those compared to US/China and having more competitors is even more factor for these double bronzes 2) There are a lot of sports with only 1 or 2 competitors for each country. China is completely crushing some of them. Sweeping the golds, but leaving silver/bronze open(often gets picked up by European countries). Diving(8/2/1) , table tennis(5/1/0) and to lesser extent shooting/weightlifting. They would have a lot more silver/bronze if 3competitors per country in those US is somewhat in the middle while getting a lot of there medals in 2classic Olympic sports athletics/swimming. It isn't in similar crushing way with the medals more spread out(22/24/16 combined)
Also, that "whole medal count" vs " gold medal count" was SO IMPORTANT in the Australian discourse and the Olympics. Our media was EXTREMELY INTERESTED in having it be 'gold medals' because this was our best Olympics ever and we're rarely in the top 3 for the medal tally (which we were for the first half this year). It was mostly pretty light-hearted, but i was surprised how often i saw it discussed 🤣.
I’m of the opinion that it should be medals/team size. That way the countries that send people to every event aren’t automatically “winning” the Olympics.
Paralympics! Keep up the enthusiasm for the Paralympics, they're a-MAZ-ing! And, Hank, given your tv habits, you would likely enjoy the Paralympics coverage from The Last Leg (UK Channel 4 but I find ways to watch it here in the States).
Very easy to prove or disprove your theory about bronzes trending in the aggregate, Hank! It's method you've already used, too: Get all medal numbers for all countries that have competed in the past 20 years. Do 40 or so random selections of the same number of countries that are in continental Europe as a sample size; look at the findings. If the random selections of countries have the same trend of bronze medals that Europe has, it proves your theory. If they don't have that trend, you might have to adjust for median GDP or compare the number of olympians instead of the countries.
Stay curious, my friend. Stay curious. Keep learning, keep asking questions, keep making wildly interesting for no reason videos. Keep the nerds seeking those wildly untertaining answers. Hank and John Green beautiful minds .
TBH we hate all highways. I-91 is awful, I-95 is a parking lot. We also blame all the states around us. New York sends us rich people that drive bad, Massachusetts sends us people that drive worse, new jersey is probably to blame for some reason I haven't thought of yet.
@@jakeoliver9167 dialect vs language is a political/cultural distinction. Just wanted to point that out because ik many think what separates language from dialect is if monolingual speakers of their respective dialect/language can understand each other. This is false, at least on a global scale. The difference is if they originate within the same country or not. If yes, dialect. If no, language. (This may be an oversimplification but it is largely true) In China, there are more than 200 different dialects (or if you want to be more general, 8 main ones), and many are not mutually intelligible. Between Czechia and Slovakia, speakers of Czech and Slovak respectively can understand each other similar to how British English and General American English (GAE) are understandable to each other, yet they are considered separate languages, not dialects. To be fair, the two countries did split from a singular country Czechoslovakia relatively recently (1990s). A more established example: Belarusian and Ukrainian are 95% intelligible to each other, according to my former Russian prof who spoke Belarusian and grew up in Belarus. A non-Slavic example: Swedish, Norwegian, and to some extent Danish, although speakers have noted that they can understand each other better in writing than in speech; point is, there is higher mutual intelligibility around those three languages than, say, Mandarin and Cantonese Chinese. I can also argue that there is greater similarity between Spanish and Italian, than between Mandarin and Fuzhounese Chinese, both of the latter I've had to learn separately (still can't speak that well for either, but can distinguish between the two and hold basic convos). Another interesting fact is that mutual intelligibility is not the same on all sides; iirc Danes understand Swedes better than Swedes understand Danes (correct me if I'm wrong). Tangentially, I've also heard that it's easier for Cantonese speakers to learn to speak Mandarin, than it is for Mandarin speakers to learn Cantonese. Growing up in the West, I'm more inclined to think of Fuzhounese and Mandarin as separate languages (based on the perception of "whether you can understand the other" that I've had for a very long time), even tho many other Chinese folks would disagree and they are not considered separate languages officially by the country (China). You can say that distinction between dialect and language is not based on the languages themselves, but identity
@@jakeoliver9167 Famously, a language is a dialect with an army and a fleet, and Connecticut used to have both of these. Nowadays, the Connecticut Naval Militia has been dormant for quite some time, so I'd classify Connecticutian as an endangered language.
the thing with the “you have no idea how different states are” is i think the person wasnt saying that the us is as culturally diverse as europe, but more so europeans have no awareness of the cultural diversity that does exist in america between different states and regions. which is proven true by everyone who downplayed america’s diversity by saying “i cant believe they’re trying to say the us is as culturally diverse as europe” when thats a completely different sentence from what they were saying
Yeah, given the way that internet/twitter arguments go and push everyone to extreme corners, I could see it sounding like someone is seriously arguing that the states are as different as the various European countries. But yeah I'm sure the starting point was "there's more variation than people recognize."
I definitely seen people say/imply that America is more diverse than Europe in these twitter arguments, (I'm not from either btw, so no skin in the game, just reporting what I've seen).
People in Europe and other parts of the world just read most messages from Americans that sound like the one in the example as an alternative way of saying "we're the exception" which gets annoying the 120th time around when the references we have are people actually meaning it literally when they say that kinda stuff.
06:56 that makes sense, gut feeling wise. just from watching i'd say it's more common to have only the winner be far ahead of everyone than to have exactly three people far ahead. can't be asked to back that up by data though
It's not a mystery, there is a simple rule that takes the place of honor: If America gets the most gold medals, we say "Gold = winner, we win" If we don't, but they get the most 2nd and 3rd place medals, then we say "most medals = winner, we win" Let's overlook that American hands out citizenship to athletes that are qualified to compete under our flag.
You're right, of course, that it's the individuals (and their trainers & support networks) who actually win the medals, not the countries. But I have one good reason to care about the countries: it opens up an avenue for second-hand joy when an underdog country wins a medal. This Olympics had a HUGE moment on Aug 3 when Grenada, Dominica, and St Lucia each won medals ON THE SAME DAY. Those countries are absolutely miniscule and this was a huge breakthrough for them. For Dominica and St Lucia these are their first Olympic medals EVER. This is why the real measure that matters isn't medals, or golds, but medals-per-capita. (I'm definitely not just saying that because I'm from New Zealand and we also did really well by that metric...)
If "what matters" is medals-per-capita, then countries of average size have an advantage, or small countries if they are lucky. If "what matters" is gold medals, then big countries have an advantage. It can be checked with a simulation, and we just observe the same effect in the real world...
The great part about being part of the community is that most people here are high achieving nerds and therefore by the time we're thinking about it, someone else has ALREADY done the rabbithole diving and kindly posted the answer here xD
The mystery of this year is that a country with a population of 19 million people won 34 medals, 15 gold, 7 silver and 12 bronze. That population is like the population of the state of New York.
I suspect there's a large correlation between how much a country spends on its Olympic national teams (per athlete), and number of medals (though obviously other factors like population correlate too). That's actually pretty sad if you remember that the modern Olympics was founded on the principle that money should not be a factor. That's why participation was originally limited to amateurs - no professionals allowed.
@@solandri69 It is true that how much is spent = more medals, I'm from the UK and we have 'invested' lots of lottery money into olympic sports for the last few decades, and it has payed off in the medal count especially in events like track cycling, rowing and a few others. But even in the amateur days there was a large percentage of entrants who were not really amateur especially from the Eastern block, so many were 'classed' as policeman or other government jobs, but they were only really employed on paper, they were full time athletes in reality.
One more thing that matters a lot: who chose the Olympic events and who still choosing them. Countries do not have participants in most of them and a lot of sports categories are neglected. So results are influenced by culture and what sports are the most valued in a country
I am curious as to (in Paris) which country had the most ENTRANTS for the events. Did Americans (USA) compete for more of the 329 gold medals than any other country? ( Europe is not a country. They don't march into the stadium under one flag. They don't play "Ode to Joy" for the medal ceremony. THEY AREN'T A COUNTRY! )
The socioeconomic aspects and accessibility of sports is a big filter. It's been said that "the greatest basketball player has never tossed a basketball, the greatest baseball player has never swung a bat" meaning that there are likely people with an innate talent and the potential to be the greatest athlete in a specific sport have just never had the opportunity to discover or reach that goal. The "greatest" that we know have made it through a huge set of filters to get to where they are now, though someone else may have made even greater use of those same opportunities.
From the graph, it looks like Europe has a bronze surplus of around 20 medals. Europe won around 1/3 medals and there are 50 bronze medals handed out extra as some, mainly martial arts, sports hand out multiple bronze medals. Which would account for most of the "extra bronze medals".
I also wonder about the consistency of who gets gold and silver over the European bronzes. Is it always the same countries winning it all against them?
@@Baselow I haven't done the research, but my bet is that, given enough time, this equalizies to the all-time medal count. As in: Whoever has the most gold medals overall, will also have the most wins over european bronze medalists...
That said, French swimmer Léon Marchand beat one of Michael Phelps's world records in these Olympics, and is also the only athlete who won four gold medals. 😎
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I'm sure you considered this but: Wouldn't it be the case that with fewer people (because it is just one country) there is more _impact_ when someone gets gold? That is, they can't _also_ get silver and bronze?
This probably has no effect on your research but tiebreakers also affect medal distribution and count. (especially for swimming) If there are two gold medalists because of a tie there will not be silver medalist. The next athlete get awarded a bronze. If there is a tie in the silver medal position there is no bronze medal given. The next athlete is awarded 4th place. If there is a tie in the third place and all tie breaker scenarios have been taken into account two athletes can be awarded the bronze medal. This happened in Tokyo during a gymnastics event.
Can you do an analysis on how much each country spends on training, facilities, etc. in comparison with their medals? If all countries dumped as much money into Olympic athletes as the US, I don’t think the US would win the most medals anymore
We're here because we're here.
Btw: there’s an odd number of swimming events because it’s 18 men, 18 women, and one mixed event which is a 4x100 relay
thank you!
Thank you, I was looking for this!
Are there a certain number of men and women required to be on the teams? Otherwise, they would just be dominated by men, no?
@@willtheprodigy3819Yes. 2 men and 2 women.
@@willtheprodigy3819each team also had a different strategy on which stroke to choose for their two men and two women which led to a very interesting race to watch
I love that this video is essentially an almost 8 minute pitch to a bored grad student to write a paper..... and as a grad student, im kinda tempted
I suspect this would be a pretty straight forward phenomena to capture with a variety of methods. Fun part is there are a LOT of grad students with enough statistical background that proving this wouldn't be that crazy. may actually take someone from a stats department (or similar) to get it published though.
If you decide to write this paper please let me know
I have plenty of coding experience to support if someone else takes the lead lol, not volunteering to take the head on this but I am happy to run Monte Carlo sims or something if the initial idea and work progresses beyond initial concept.
I'm loving the enthusiasm in these comments. I don't have enough stats experience to lead this type of paper, but if we got a group together with at least one person with a solid stats background, I would love to be part of it ☺️
@@sharks2571 See if anyone else pipes up in the comments.
I would love to read the attribution statement on a paper and see how the heck a group of authors got together, RUclips comments has to be a rare nucleolus.
I need Hank to start making Paralympics content bc there's so much cool adaptive tech on display and the broadcasters never talk about it as much as I want them to lol
Yes please!
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I think there is another adventage for Europe with the multiple countries.
For the teamsports, if America gets gold, it can not also get silver an bronze.
While for Europe it is possible to have all 3 medals.
On the other hand, for individual sports, a single country can and has swept the podium before, that sort of cancels out the European advantage for team events
The combined EU can also sweep the podium, but the advantage still remains for the team events.
third hand here, team sports favor large countries because small countries have trouble sourcing enough top level athletes for any specific sport
Good point. To eliminate this advantage when comparing USA vs "Europe", all you need to do is count only the highest place finish by a European team in any event.
it doesn't cancell it out bc so can any European team and they get more entries because they have more countries @@Phlimbob
Something to note is that in the history of the olympics there have been more bronze medals (7437) awarded, than silver (6933) or gold ones (6964). Some martial arts, like Judo, Boxing and Taekwondo give 2 bronze medals, so there's just more of them.
Very true. This could be it actually to some degree. As well as the double medal (both gold and bronze) possibility being much higher than that of the US limited number of athletes.
Came here to say the same thing, as I suspect this is the main reason driving this. I wonder what the stats would look like if you excluded the sports that always award two bronze medals. Unfortunately I do think this is a lot more boring of an answer than the ideas that Hank proposed but... that is sorta how the world usually is. (Judo in particular is very heavily weighted towards continental Europe.) For anyone interested in exploring this, the full list of sports that award two bronze medals are Boxing, Judo, Taekwondo, and Wrestling.
Does double silver mean no bronze? Ditto with double gold?
@@SayAhhCorrect. A tie for gold means no silver is awarded, only a bronze. A tie for silver means no bronze is awarded. You could make things more complicated with a tie for gold and another for bronze, to three-way ties…
@@AlexRochette We could have had a 1 gold medal, 1 silver medal, 3 bronze medals situation in gymnastics
I like how you say that it's not countries that win medals but individuals, but then go on to explain how a lot depends on the country to be able to win medals.
It's sadly true, there is a reason you can find top runner from Kenya, especially long distance running but there isn't any swimming champion or basketball or whatever, having the potential to become a champion is one thing, having the infrastructure to develop that potential into making you a top level contender is a completely other thing.
You can never take off in swimming if you don't have a pool to train in. Not to mention coaches.
One is about individual performance, the other about statistics and (socio)economics.
Hank is like "Why didn't I get a spy?" but maybe his spy was just sneakier than John's.
Hank, I now need you to think back through your life and figure out who the likeliest person to have been your secret spy was!!
Claiming to be disappointed and/or relieved that you didn't get to meet a spy might be the sort of thing a spy would do if they didn't want anyone to suspect...
I propose that no one would see the value in spying on Hank because Hank just straight up excitedly shares all the interesting things he learns.
Plot twist, John IS an asset... and his own brother's spy!
@Dilz6669 this was my thought; what a cover.
John's "I want to be neither an asset nor a threat" is an iconic line but we cannot let Hank's "I want to be an asset AND a threat" go unappreciated
The way Hank said it really cracked me up.
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Asset + threat = assthreat
So... a bomb?
There are two kinds of people in the world:
"Why didn't I get a spy?" is the most younger sibling energy ever.
Hank, I am not sure if you came across the fact that several events in the Olympics involve Semi-final matches before the final to decide the medalists. And numerous ones don't actually do a 3rd place match. They give out Bronze medals to both loosing semi-finalists. So this definitely has an impact on total Bronze medal winning opportunities with a higher number of participants per game for Europe as a whole than individual countries I think
Ooo! Interesting!
Are bronze medal placements also just more likely to be ties, in individual events? Because they are closer to the "average" of the event?
Wait, which sports do that? I've never seen or heard of that happening. :/ I've seen sports where there are two semi-finals, and the winners of each semi go on to the A-final, where the winner gets the gold and the loser gets the silver, and the losers of the two semis go on to the B-final where the winner gets the bronze and the loser gets fourth. (Archery does this, frex.) I've never seen nor even heard of an Olympic sport where two different competitors/countries get bronze medals as a matter of course. Examples please?
It really doesn't make sense to have people who lost a boxing match (possibly by knockout) to fight another bout. Therefore, both semi-final losers get a bronze medal.
@@angiepen boxing is the obvious one (I presume because people who lose a semi-final are quite likely to not be medically cleared to fight again in a few days)... @davidlocke3477 beat me to it by like 30 seconds...
Honestly, I don't care which country get the most medals. I am more focused on the countries that get their first gold medal. Botswana, Dominica, Guatemala, and Saint Lucia all got their first gold medals ever, with Dominica & St. Lucia being their first ever. Seeing an underdog nation win against all the odds makes me filled with joy.
Although, the real winner for this Olympics are the memes.
I love seeing winners from underrepresented countries who only have a handful of participants and probably not a whole lot of support from their OC. It makes winning all the more impressive!
Carlos Yulo won the Philippines first ever gymnastics medal and first gymnastics gold medal in Paris (in floor exercise), then turned around the next day and won their second gymnastics gold medal! There were a bunch of first ever country medals in gymnastics this year, and most of them were gold medals!
@@erinm9445 Let's not forget the Philippines won their first ever gold in 2020 by Hidilyn Diaz. I was so happy she won!
I’m just fascinated that there are still countries out there that have never won an Olympic medal.
@@shayelea In addition to Dominica and St. Lucia, the nations of Albania and Cabo Verde earned their first ever Olympic medal in 2024. According to Wiki, there are 64 nations* that have never received a medal, the largest of them being Bangladesh.
* - Some of the "nations" at the Olympics are not fully independent.
My country got 2 medals, which is a historic record for us and we're so proud of it :')
Congratulations!!! What's your country?
Grenada?
Philippines?
Congrats!
Guatemala?
Former swimmer here 👋 the infrastructure of USA swimming is an absolute machine in a way I didn’t see my friends experience in their respective sports. As a nation our swimming community is just really really serious
As a non-swimmer, don’t so many non-Americans train and compete here. Like the machine can’t just be cranking out solely american swimmers. Isn’t it just good swimmers from anywhere that get better training in the USA? I might be completely wrong
My sister who swims told me once that the Olympics is the second fastest swim meet in the world. The fastest swim meet in the world is the US Olympic qualifiers.
Australia would like a word.
Australia is the same. Which is why these two countries spend so much time trading golds in the pool 😂
Yeah, I can’t speak to Australia’s program as I’ve never been, but clearly they are also great at producing high caliber swimmers! My sibling was there for for Worlds in the 2000s and from what I heard the pools were beautiful 😊
7:27 Hank not realizing the obvious possibility here that he DID get a spy and didn't know it
Gotta make them feel comfortable and unseen 😴
Nobody say it...nobody say it . . .
Plot twist, John IS an asset... and his own brother's spy!
@@Dilz6669 maybe family is the spies we met along the way 🥰
@@goinkosublue z…
Bogur being on a hank green video is something i never thought i would ever see.
WINTON RISING 🦍🦍🦍🦍🗣️🗣️🗣️🗣️🔥🔥🔥🔥❗️❗️❗️❗️
Dude plays overwatch and gets caught yapping lol
Hank Green. Father, husband, author, RUclipsr, and now…detective.
Don't forget science communicator, stand-up comedian, and America's first sock man!🧦
And maybe future asset and threat.
You forgot sock salesman!
and double agent
Could you kindly add "a bit into philantropy" somewhere in the middle? Thanks.
I feel like 'discourse' is the wrong word for what happens on Twitter. It implies that there's a level of communication going on.
You know how monkeys throw their poop as a way to communicate? Well we as a species have never come up with a formal universally accepted word for that. We might as well say “discourse.”
@@theoriginalkimerliI mean, there's "poopslinging". Or of my own invention, faesesfighting.
Mudslinging
As with all social interaction... it all depends on who you're interacting with. Curate a feed, ignore the trolls, block those who add nothing. Start with academics & journalists & you'll see far less "mudslinging" and pointlessness.
@NAKd_life i dont think any site whose selling point is a low character limit should be anyones primary way of viewing anything personally
I once saw a study that showed that athletes winning bronze medals were happier that gold medal winners. The reasoning went thus: Silver is lost, gold leaves empty feeling "what next?", but bronze means that you got medal and still have something to aim for
The other reasoning would be that if you win Silver you might be tortured with thoughts of "if I only did better and got Gold...." but if you got Bronze you're more likely to think "Awesome, I placed!"
@@BirdieRumia yes, exactly
It also depends on the competition format. If you have a semi-final, a final, and a third-place play-off, then both the gold and the bronze medalists have finished their event with a winning match. And the bronze medalists went into that final match knowing that bronze was what they were fighting for.
What I've seen was gold > bronze > silver in terms of happiness. Bronze being happy they placed but Silver often feeling they that they could have just done a little more to get gold.
I think this is well summarized with, "Second place is first loser."
Hank, I’ve been a fan for a long time. But this is perhaps the first time we’ve fallen down the same rabbit hole at the same time. I just presented all my findings to my husband last night (the poor man). I have so many thoughts. But I’m so glad you shared.
Did you by any chance look at educational policies while down that rabbit hole?
Belgium has had an interesting reaction to the many medals won by the Netherlands this time. If there's no Belgian medal candidate in an event, Flemish Belgium is generally speaking happy to celebrate Dutch wins. Yet this time it all got a bit much, with NL winning left right and centre, so there was also quite a lot of commentary on what caused this very noticeable difference.
Relative affluence and population size can't explain all of it and sports preferences are quite similar both in team and individual events so it's not that either. Which basically only leaves direct investment in elite athletes, as well as the educational policies and slight differences in broader cultural attitudes to sports which make a difference to whether those athletes get an opportunity to rise to the top in the first place.
But I haven't looked at the details of this, let alone more broadly in terms of how much of a difference this actually makes also in other cases, like Australia for example.
@@rdklkje13i bet this is the correct answer. affluence allows more investment in athletes and their training
Running a quick numerical simulation, this effect seems to be attributable to just the country size. When we group Europe's medals together, we see an average of what happens for all these small countries. What matters is what happens in a small country on average, vs in a big country.
The numerical simulation I ran is a simplification, of course, but we see this effect even more clearly than with the real data of the Olympics. I picked three types of countries, defined by their populations: Large, Medium and Small. I picked 100 events. For each event, every person in every country gets a random score between 0 and 1. Every country selects its best person, and then the countries get a medal for the event based on the scores of their champion. The Large countries got more gold than bronze. The Medium countries got more bronze than gold. And the Small countries got nothing.
Easy to say after running the experiment but it's not a surprising after all. It's just because big countries have more chance to win gold, hence not bronze. To compensate, smaller countries have more chance to win bronze, since on average we need as much bronze as gold. Maybe it was mentioned in the video, or in a comment I think. Of course country size is not the only factor for the number of medals, but this seems to explain this phenomenon by itself.
@@asainpopiu6033interesting! Thanks for sharing. :)
I see it as bell curve of the position in events. China and USA’s mode of the curve is more around 1st or 2nd place. Europe, on average, has a mode that’s 3rd place or probably lower. For USA and China, population size is part of it but it’s also about the money being spent on sports training.
So I have a couple of theories which I think may both contribute a bit:
1) As some other comments have mentioned, lots of martial arts (boxing, taekwondo and judo definitely do this) offer 2 bronze medals, either for the losers of both semis, or in the case of taekwondo, a repackage system that allows a bronze to also be awarded to an athlete who lost to an eventual finalist early on. Places in Europe are pretty good as these sports, but not quite as good as the best such as Uzbekistan in boxing, so will win a lot of bronze given there’s twice the number on offer anyway
2) There are several sports with lots of medals on offer which other teams are historically dominant in for some reason or another, such as the US/Kenya/Jamaica in athletics, Australia/US in swimming and China in diving. With money pumped in, European countries can get amongst the medals in these, but with such dominant other countries they’re often competing for silver or bronze essentially. For example, GB has a decent medal chance in every diving event and ended with medals in 6 of 8 events, but with China sweeping every gold (and occasionally gold and silver in the individual events) it meant these medals would be most likely bronze, then silver
Just to add - even if European countries are the best at those events (not just 'good'), it could still explain the difference.
If European countries made up all the semi finalists, then they would collectively get more bronze than gold or silver.
There is also the consideration that the IOC is very Euro-centric, and there are a lot of sports that are very European with long histories and followings only in Europe. The fact that they are so many European countries means that you can get a coalition of neighbors together who want to see a sport that few people outside of Europe play or even know about.
For example, handball. Handball's popularity across Europe is possibly on par with baseball across the US. But it is arguably less popular across the world than baseball, when baseball has major leagues in Central America, South America, the Caribbean, Japan, Korea, Taiwan, and even Australia. But since baseball isn't popular in Europe, you don't get as many votes calling for it in the Olympics.
Handball isn’t popular in Europe. Certainly not even remotely as popular as baseball is the US.
@@Zveebo North vs south Europe split. Iceland for example has handball and football. They don't really do much other sports in organized form.
Yeah there’s a zero-sum thing going on with the golds: if the China “especially good at identifying elite” effect is real, they’re removing an excess of golds from the potential “pool”. (No pun intended).
NOT THE BOGUR TWEET LMAO
BOGUR LORE EXPANDS!!
Hank being very intrigued by data is refreshing because I keep accidentally infodumping to my coworkers abour Bach, and it's nice to see a kindred spirit.
Can I have some Bach info please :3
JS?
I also would like to subscribe to Bach facts. Did you know his lute works weren’t really written for a lute, but rather a keyboarded instrument that sounds a lot like a lute?
At least you can still catch all the days of the Paralympics! 🎉
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1:06 bogur jumpscare lmao
Ikr I watched this video without knowing the bogur video. I saw his tweet abt it and was genuinely confused and shocked when it showed up here)
“I want to be an asset and a threat.”
You are SO PUNK ROCK!
My two moods are Hank and John
I will not elaborate
@@daemoneko Inside you are two vlogbrothers...
hank has got to be one of the best internet-talkers of all time, like he can just make anything interesting through sheer passion and childlike joy.
I have the answer:
Higher number of participants combined with KO ranking system.
Assuming for simplicity that there is no randomness in the athletic performance itself, and assuming there was an unknown "true" ranking of the athletes.
Under these assumptions the true best athlete should get gold. But with 10 KO rounds there are 10 people who lose against the future gold medallist. The true second best could be any one of those 10.
Then the true third best is also among these first 10 losers, but also among everybody who lost to the 10 first losers. Which is an additional 55 people.
Due to this KO system randomness, there is an advantage to have more people in the competition for silver and bronze.
5:20 The key at the top of the graph was super helpful, thanks for including it.
Hahaha! I didn’t even notice it 😂
I thought that was one of those printer test swatches
There are more bronze medals than gold medals awarded ( in judo, wrestling, boxing and taekwendo there are 2 bronze medals).
Maybe Europe is more focused on those? Or since Europe has more participants they have more opportunities to snatch the 2 bronze in those events (while with the small number of participants it would be highly unlikely for the US)
The was only one bronze medal in wrestling this year. I don't know about previous years.
@@IlIlllIllIlIIIllNo, there were two bronze medals awarded in each wrestling event this year and has been since 2008.
Boxing, Wrestling, Judo, and Taekwondo all have two bronzes, resulting in a total of 54 more Bronze medal slots than gold or silver in Paris. Due to ties there was one more silver than gold and 56 more bronzes than gold awarded for the games.
Yes, and I don't see a lot of representatives for China or the USA in combat sports in recent times. Also the 'Europe' total will be closer to the total of all medals as it wins more. No mystery, really.
@@ubertoaster99That's not entirely accurate. The US earned one medal in boxing, one medal in Tae Kwon Do, and 7 in wrestling. If you count fencing (it's technically a combat sport) that's another 4 medals.
Came here to say just this - the number of medals awarded + inherent randomness due to the sheer number of countries would together explain this well.
No research paper unfortunately, Hank
Something I'd hypothesize might play a role is the pattern for other medals. If a country like China is winning a lot of gold medals, there are only so many gold medals to go around and so that reduces the number available for other countries. So it may not only be that theres something about Europe that makes them likely to get Bronze, but that other wealthy countries with fewer people in each event when compared to all of Europe have something making them win gold or silver more often, leaving bronze.
There are also just more bronze medals. In Paris it was 329 gold, 330 silver and 385 bronze! I think this is mostly because of fighting sports like judo that award a second bronze medal for the 4th place.
Also, because those sports limit the # of entry per country to 1, every event has 4 different countries winning a medal, and there's a good chance that many of those countries are going to be European.
That's interesting. What event offers 2 silver medals?
@@definetheterms1236 Men's 100m Breaststroke had a tie for 2nd, and awarded two silver medals, and no bronze medal.
Fighting events, so people don’t fight an extra time. Both losers in the semis get bronze.
Could redo the whole calculation removing any sport that give double bronze medal see how it changes the result.
No way bogur, a smaller overwatch streamer, makes it into a vlog brothers video... wild
Hell yeah!
I know right!
I reject anything sports-like from my life or periphery, but this kind of theory, calculation, and discussion remind me sooo much of the discussions Eurovision analysts do every year lol
Nothing more satisfying than listening to Hank going down a rabbit hole analyzing interesting data points on a Friday Afternoon
Its the best
5:45 "Every olympics for the last 20 years"
you know, except the cold ones
Thanks now my mind can't stop dwelling on this. I have real work to do today
Hi Hank! The Italian media was actually discussing this, because we noticed we had the most 4th places of any country at some point during the Olympics. The final tally was 25, still ahead of any other country. As for other medals, Italy got 12 golds, 13 silvers, and 15 bronzes. Thought it might be interesting for you :)
Neat! I didn't know there was a fourth place
@@geeksdo1tbetter Fourth place is The Participated Well "invisible trophy" or "if I had just done a little better, I would have got the Bronze medal"
Ah Italy won by wooden medals then 🙂
Interesting, I'd be curious to see a country breakdown to see if most other European countries also follow that pattern like Italy does. It makes some intuitive sense to me that most would, but any country that bucks that trend would be interesting to look into!
Italy would get the sad ending of Mario kart 64
Hank, never stop being curious. And not just the I-wonder-if-that-is-true curiosity that most of us have, but the I-bet-there's-data-on-this-I-can-find-to-determine-whether-this-is-true curiosity. The effort to create new knowledge in the world - even if it's new only to you (and us) - is lovely and admirable and, frankly, inspiring. Thank you. I need to be more like you.
This is the nerdy content I live for. Thanks Hank! :)
Becasue you mentioned Michael Phelps having so many gold medals because there are so many more swimming events: this year Mijaín López from Cuba became the first ever athlete to win 5 straight gold medals in the same event, but because as a wrestler the events are based on weight, he can only compete in that event, so despite dominating his event in the Olympics for 20 years, he only has 5 gold medals.
Seeing an Overwatch streamer I watch be in a vlogbrothers video, and in fact being the main spark of this video because of the discourse he sparked is both hilarious and confusing
Bogur's really making it big out here
As usual, a brilliant and creative (and a little humorous) video from Hank Green. Thanks, Hank.
Bogur (an overwatch streamer) inspiring a Hank Green video is a weird intersection of worlds I was not expecting today.
As a Canadian, the US vs Europe discourse will never not be funny to me. Definitely one of the best parts of the internet. 10/10
Often canada is spoken of *with* the us when people say "america"
But every country is getting more and more messed up so the discussion will be moot soon😑
@@LiliththelizardYou might think it's funny, but the Europeans hate you nearly as much as they hate us.
You're just not as fun to draw into pointless discussions.
I don't see a way GB is willing to be lumped in with "Europe"
Since when has language indicated nationhood? Canada and French speaking comes to mind.
@@ApequHto be fair it is in Europe, the continent (division of globe, not mainland) as opposed to the European Union (organisation). It’s hard to argue the UK isn’t in Europe…
I actually noticed a fair number of these things and just pondered for a while; I did NOT go down the rabbit hole, but I’m glad you did.
Friendly neighborhood reminder that the Paralympics start on August 28!
Can't wait!
For some reason I thought it started immediately after the first one ended and I got really sad bc I thought I missed it lol
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And they, too, are humans being all kinds of awesome! Some of the adaptations make for new amazing sports! I fell in love with para ice hockey (« ice sledge ») a couple of winter games ago.
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"Possibly longer, I just got bored." Relatable.
That is me. But I also have ADHD, so of course it is.
Any European showing the same hunger as an American for gold and success would immediately be regarded as arrogant, egocentric and many other adjectives and some subtle sabotage would ensue, from the other members of the team even from the trainers.
I am guessing you already noticed this, but they do give out significantly more bronze medals (2 medals per gold medal) in the boxing, wrestling and Taekwondo events. Higher bronze count may also play a part in the sports that Europe focus on? Maybe?
Wrestling had a third place match this year. I don't know if they did it in years past. It seemed like they didn't because the announcers kept mentioning the wrestle-back opportunities for third.
I personally don't know much about wrestling, but if it uses the same system as judo, that makes sense. If i remember correctly, when you lose a quarter final in the Olympic judo tournament, you get another opportunity against another losing quarter finalist. The winner of that contest gets a bronze medal contest against a losing semi finalist. So the first repechage round takes 4 losing QFs, and the the 2 winners enter their own bronze medal contests against 2 losing SFs.
My number 1 Olympics mystery is: how is it possible that Austria, as a landlocked nation, won 2 out of 10 gold medals in sailing?
Lakes?
I mean as someone who’s technically not from a landlocked nation but the closest ocean (within my country/province) is a 24 hour straight drive, freezing and pretty desolate I concur with lakes😆 I once lived in a pretty small city that had over 300 lakes within city limits and sailing was definitely a thing on them, I’m assuming Austria must have some decent lakes for sailing😊
I have been to Austria and seen a lake with boats on it, so I can confirm that lakes is likely the answer
Lakes exist?
Beyond lakes existing, it's good to note that Austria is still very close to the Mediterranean sea.
This is really cool. Thanks for sharing and deep diving.
But how many medals does Nerdfighteria have? At least 2 bronze medals in men’s gymnastics.
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Wait what?
@@mimi3570 Stephen Nedoroscik is a confirmed nerdfighter and won two bronze medals in men's gymnastics!
@@untappedinkwell congrats, Stephen!!
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European here. I've seen a lot of EU medal trackers and charts out there. Particularly important for smaller nations in the EU who do feel part of sth bigger and also want to play a role in the "who wins the most olympic medals" game.
yeah my country has about 18 million people in it. extremely obvious we will never get more golds than the US. But objectively my country is way better at the olympics than the US. we got 15 golds with 18 million people. US got 40 with 330 million. That's leagues and leagues better. Not even close to the same realm.
@@yaboyJJJJJmedal per capita biases toward small countries for the exact reason you outline
@@kingeddiam2543 y'all missing the point that these counts and comparisons are pointless. You're supposed to get over this by the age of 11
@@kingeddiam2543 Excepting he outlined no reasons what so ever...
and certainly doesn't explain our 10 golds from
@@yaboyJJJJJ Being "better at olympics" is a very weird sentence imo.
Why did you mesure with medals / population?
Why not medals / gdp? Or medals / dollar of infrastructure? Or any other similar metric?
Bogur an Overwatch streamer in a Hank Green video 😂 that is hilarious
Mixed swimming relay!! I loved all the new mixed events. 💜
This seems like the kind of thing that the RUclips channel Secret Base. It's at the intersection of sports, statistics and showing charts, beautiful, beautiful charts.
(jsyk i read this to the tune of "beautiful man. beautiful, beautiful man" from the Elijah Wood's prank interview)
Chart Party and Dorktown make (made?) some of the best videos on RUclips
It's Pretty Good, I guess.
I appreciate that you pronounce affluent the way you do.
I started hearing people say it like uh-fluent, and it gives me the icks.. but I started to question myself.
3:45 I was waiting for the “different strokes for different folks “ joke
I'm relieved, nay, very pleased, to discover that, not only am I not the only one who made spreadsheets and graphs of countries in the Olympics comparing gold, silver and bronze medals, population size, gdp, gdp per capita, median income, etc, but that at least one of the OTHER people also doing it is Hank! 😃😃😃
@5:34 “This isn’t an effect of a sport having more events or a country having more people” - no Hank, it’s an effect of a continent having more countries (and therefore more individual teams in the olympics). If we assume that 3rd place is more high variance of a medal than gold (because gold goes to the best competitor, no matter how much better they are than the competition, where as bronze goes to the best middle-of-the-pack competitor), then it makes sense that a very rich continent fielding a bunch of different teams would have a better shot than any individual country of snagging that bronze position.
Take the synchronized 10m diving from this year’s olympics as an example. China had gold LOCKED UP. There was no competition even close to them. Similarly, silver (North Korea) was way ahead of the pack. But the competition for Bronze was intense. 3 different countries were super close to getting Bronze and it ended up going to Great Britain. In these types of scenarios where there is a significant gap between the best competitors and the rest of the pack, you will find a huge grouping effect of scores around the 2nd-4th place range and in that scenario, Europe, with it’s many many different countries/competitors has a huge advantage for snagging Bronze.
Hank referencing a bogur tweet was not on my 2024 bingo card
This can probably be explained by the fact that most events have a limit on athletes that can be sent from one country. If you aggregate all Europeans, you are essentially bypassing this limit (e.g. there might be 8 athletes competing across all of Europe , whereas the USA might be limited to 3). This becomes more apparent in the bronze medal count which is subject to more variance, thereby favoring the "country" (or continent in this case) that was able to send more athletes.
For a more specific example, in the qualifying round for women's all around gymnastics, USA got 3 of the 4 highest scores, but Jordan Chiles did not make it through to the final round since there was a limit of 2 athletes per country that qualified (Simone and Suni qualified). If Jordan made it to the final round, there's a decent chance she could've gotten bronze.
If Jordan had made it into the final round and gotten bronze, then Suni would have been in fourth. Rebecca Andrade was going to be on that podium.
Hank looks so much like John in this thumbnail
Its funny to watch the US x Europe discourse as someone from Brazil. We as a nation get so happy and emotional with every single podium, no matter the position, the athletes become kind of beloved celebrities across the country. There's fanart, memes, edits on tiktok, mass following... And we're not even close to the top in any configuration of the ranking lists
Andrade was really impressive this year!
Specially with CazeTv bringing the Olympics to RUclips. Interactions with people in chat and organizing mass following to the athletes was definitely something that changed this year's Olympics from a Brazilian point of view. Also, their coverage on social media in general was sooo cool to see! The amount of impressions at every single post sharing that we won another medal... it didn't matter if it was gold or bronze, or which sport. I just hope that we invest more in the not so mainstream sports.
same!! it was so wonderful watching these olympics from the brazilian perspective
I'm not Brazilian but Rebecca Andrade moved me to tears this year. I think she won so many hearts internationally, I hope you all are feeling the love!
6:30 That's what I was going to suggest. We can check that by randomly making a group of small countries and comparing them to a large country with an (overall) similar population. Then repeat that many times with a monte carlo simulation and do that for a bunch of different years.
Now that you mention it, being able to "find about cool stuff without having to go on twitter" is a great summary of why i take in nerdfightaria content. Subscribed. (to the newsletter)
was not expecting the bogur and hank green crossover but here we are
Bless you for still calling it Twitter 🙏
*Bogur mentioned* 🗣️🔥🔥🔥
I at least know 2 majors factors contributing to this outside what you already mentioned (likely more)
1)In fighting sports(boxing/judo/wrestling/taekwando) there is double bronze. Europe is relatively scoring better in those compared to US/China and having more competitors is even more factor for these double bronzes
2) There are a lot of sports with only 1 or 2 competitors for each country. China is completely crushing some of them. Sweeping the golds, but leaving silver/bronze open(often gets picked up by European countries). Diving(8/2/1) , table tennis(5/1/0) and to lesser extent shooting/weightlifting. They would have a lot more silver/bronze if 3competitors per country in those
US is somewhat in the middle while getting a lot of there medals in 2classic Olympic sports athletics/swimming. It isn't in similar crushing way with the medals more spread out(22/24/16 combined)
Some other countries with similar medal distrubition to China Japan/Uzbekistan for similar reasons
judo has single bronze though, but that double bronze thing definitely factors in for the other fighting sports!!
or not? ive seen someone else say that so i might be wrong. though i def remember seeing a brazilian athlete win a judo match and get bronze
oh just read another comment that explained that quarter finals losers can fight for both bronzes. sorry for weighing in without researching first!
Also, that "whole medal count" vs " gold medal count" was SO IMPORTANT in the Australian discourse and the Olympics. Our media was EXTREMELY INTERESTED in having it be 'gold medals' because this was our best Olympics ever and we're rarely in the top 3 for the medal tally (which we were for the first half this year). It was mostly pretty light-hearted, but i was surprised how often i saw it discussed 🤣.
The US has been total medals for literal decades. Even in the years where we lost to the USSR and the GDR
@@Zhiperser yeah it only mattered cause we were doing better than ever 🤣. I've never known us to discuss it at other years!
I’m of the opinion that it should be medals/team size. That way the countries that send people to every event aren’t automatically “winning” the Olympics.
New Zealand won 20 medals, 10 of which were gold.
Paralympics! Keep up the enthusiasm for the Paralympics, they're a-MAZ-ing! And, Hank, given your tv habits, you would likely enjoy the Paralympics coverage from The Last Leg (UK Channel 4 but I find ways to watch it here in the States).
Very easy to prove or disprove your theory about bronzes trending in the aggregate, Hank! It's method you've already used, too:
Get all medal numbers for all countries that have competed in the past 20 years. Do 40 or so random selections of the same number of countries that are in continental Europe as a sample size; look at the findings.
If the random selections of countries have the same trend of bronze medals that Europe has, it proves your theory. If they don't have that trend, you might have to adjust for median GDP or compare the number of olympians instead of the countries.
Stay curious, my friend. Stay curious.
Keep learning, keep asking questions, keep making wildly interesting for no reason videos.
Keep the nerds seeking those wildly untertaining answers.
Hank and John Green beautiful minds .
Love the video but slight note: As a Connecticut resident we do speak Connecticut-Ian, it’s a language built around hating the Merritt or I-84
Remember dialect isn't language.
TBH we hate all highways. I-91 is awful, I-95 is a parking lot. We also blame all the states around us. New York sends us rich people that drive bad, Massachusetts sends us people that drive worse, new jersey is probably to blame for some reason I haven't thought of yet.
@@jakeoliver9167 dialect vs language is a political/cultural distinction. Just wanted to point that out because ik many think what separates language from dialect is if monolingual speakers of their respective dialect/language can understand each other. This is false, at least on a global scale. The difference is if they originate within the same country or not. If yes, dialect. If no, language. (This may be an oversimplification but it is largely true)
In China, there are more than 200 different dialects (or if you want to be more general, 8 main ones), and many are not mutually intelligible. Between Czechia and Slovakia, speakers of Czech and Slovak respectively can understand each other similar to how British English and General American English (GAE) are understandable to each other, yet they are considered separate languages, not dialects. To be fair, the two countries did split from a singular country Czechoslovakia relatively recently (1990s). A more established example: Belarusian and Ukrainian are 95% intelligible to each other, according to my former Russian prof who spoke Belarusian and grew up in Belarus.
A non-Slavic example: Swedish, Norwegian, and to some extent Danish, although speakers have noted that they can understand each other better in writing than in speech; point is, there is higher mutual intelligibility around those three languages than, say, Mandarin and Cantonese Chinese. I can also argue that there is greater similarity between Spanish and Italian, than between Mandarin and Fuzhounese Chinese, both of the latter I've had to learn separately (still can't speak that well for either, but can distinguish between the two and hold basic convos). Another interesting fact is that mutual intelligibility is not the same on all sides; iirc Danes understand Swedes better than Swedes understand Danes (correct me if I'm wrong). Tangentially, I've also heard that it's easier for Cantonese speakers to learn to speak Mandarin, than it is for Mandarin speakers to learn Cantonese.
Growing up in the West, I'm more inclined to think of Fuzhounese and Mandarin as separate languages (based on the perception of "whether you can understand the other" that I've had for a very long time), even tho many other Chinese folks would disagree and they are not considered separate languages officially by the country (China). You can say that distinction between dialect and language is not based on the languages themselves, but identity
@@jakeoliver9167 Famously, a language is a dialect with an army and a fleet, and Connecticut used to have both of these. Nowadays, the Connecticut Naval Militia has been dormant for quite some time, so I'd classify Connecticutian as an endangered language.
@@cameronschyuder9034 Pretty interesting. Thank you for taking the time to type it all out.
That was a great video, Hank!
the thing with the “you have no idea how different states are” is i think the person wasnt saying that the us is as culturally diverse as europe, but more so europeans have no awareness of the cultural diversity that does exist in america between different states and regions. which is proven true by everyone who downplayed america’s diversity by saying “i cant believe they’re trying to say the us is as culturally diverse as europe” when thats a completely different sentence from what they were saying
Yeah, given the way that internet/twitter arguments go and push everyone to extreme corners, I could see it sounding like someone is seriously arguing that the states are as different as the various European countries. But yeah I'm sure the starting point was "there's more variation than people recognize."
I mean you can lay it out both ways, it's mostly just a vague statement without more context.
I definitely seen people say/imply that America is more diverse than Europe in these twitter arguments,
(I'm not from either btw, so no skin in the game, just reporting what I've seen).
People in Europe and other parts of the world just read most messages from Americans that sound like the one in the example as an alternative way of saying "we're the exception" which gets annoying the 120th time around when the references we have are people actually meaning it literally when they say that kinda stuff.
@@DethronedCrown this is also likely ambiguous. “More diverse”, in this instance, probably refers to race and or immigration, rather than cultural
06:56 that makes sense, gut feeling wise. just from watching i'd say it's more common to have only the winner be far ahead of everyone than to have exactly three people far ahead. can't be asked to back that up by data though
"every olympics for the last 20 years - possibly longer, I just got bored" super relatable
Total 2024 Medal Count: 329 Gold, 330 Silver, 385 Bronze. Note the extra Bronzes, due to some events where semifinal losers both win Bronze.
How is there one more silver than gold?
@@BionicMilkaholic there was a tie for second in the Men's 100 m Breaststroke, so two Silvers were awarded, with no Bronze
So there's double bronze in _FIFTY SEVEN_ events????
56, all the fight-sports
@@stevevernon1978 The combat sports all have weight classes so there are a lot of medals for the same thing
It's not a mystery, there is a simple rule that takes the place of honor:
If America gets the most gold medals, we say "Gold = winner, we win"
If we don't, but they get the most 2nd and 3rd place medals, then we say "most medals = winner, we win"
Let's overlook that American hands out citizenship to athletes that are qualified to compete under our flag.
Many countries actually give citizenship to athletes 😉
You're right, of course, that it's the individuals (and their trainers & support networks) who actually win the medals, not the countries. But I have one good reason to care about the countries: it opens up an avenue for second-hand joy when an underdog country wins a medal.
This Olympics had a HUGE moment on Aug 3 when Grenada, Dominica, and St Lucia each won medals ON THE SAME DAY. Those countries are absolutely miniscule and this was a huge breakthrough for them. For Dominica and St Lucia these are their first Olympic medals EVER.
This is why the real measure that matters isn't medals, or golds, but medals-per-capita.
(I'm definitely not just saying that because I'm from New Zealand and we also did really well by that metric...)
If "what matters" is medals-per-capita, then countries of average size have an advantage, or small countries if they are lucky. If "what matters" is gold medals, then big countries have an advantage. It can be checked with a simulation, and we just observe the same effect in the real world...
Yeah no one cares NZ sucks
03:35 I was entirely expecting Hank to say “There’s different stokes, for different folks.”
"Yea, I want to be an asset AND a threat" - Hank Green
😆
This had pristine Hanks Channel vibes
“You get to figure that alone” …Did Hank Green just give me homework? I feel like I have to figure it out now.
The great part about being part of the community is that most people here are high achieving nerds and therefore by the time we're thinking about it, someone else has ALREADY done the rabbithole diving and kindly posted the answer here xD
I assume it's because there's some mixed events now... But I'm not looking it up. I'm not doing homework. I'm not a nerd... Wait... 😜
"I wanna be an asset AND a threat" is definitely going to be my 2024 Fall vibe
The mystery of this year is that a country with a population of 19 million people won 34 medals, 15 gold, 7 silver and 12 bronze.
That population is like the population of the state of New York.
spoiler
netherlands
I suspect there's a large correlation between how much a country spends on its Olympic national teams (per athlete), and number of medals (though obviously other factors like population correlate too). That's actually pretty sad if you remember that the modern Olympics was founded on the principle that money should not be a factor. That's why participation was originally limited to amateurs - no professionals allowed.
New Zealand can beat those figures. 5 million people,.10 gold, 7 silver, 3 bronze for 20 medals!
@@solandri69 It is true that how much is spent = more medals, I'm from the UK and we have 'invested' lots of lottery money into olympic sports for the last few decades, and it has payed off in the medal count especially in events like track cycling, rowing and a few others.
But even in the amateur days there was a large percentage of entrants who were not really amateur especially from the Eastern block, so many were 'classed' as policeman or other government jobs, but they were only really employed on paper, they were full time athletes in reality.
One more thing that matters a lot: who chose the Olympic events and who still choosing them. Countries do not have participants in most of them and a lot of sports categories are neglected.
So results are influenced by culture and what sports are the most valued in a country
I am curious as to (in Paris) which country had the most ENTRANTS for the events. Did Americans (USA) compete for more of the 329 gold medals than any other country? ( Europe is not a country. They don't march into the stadium under one flag. They don't play "Ode to Joy" for the medal ceremony. THEY AREN'T A COUNTRY! )
4:00 mixed relays?
Yep that’s what I guessed
Bingo
Winter Olympics: "am I a joke to you?"
Has that frog lamp always been there? I only just noticed it and I'm OBSESSED.
For at least awhile now, I think!
The socioeconomic aspects and accessibility of sports is a big filter. It's been said that "the greatest basketball player has never tossed a basketball, the greatest baseball player has never swung a bat" meaning that there are likely people with an innate talent and the potential to be the greatest athlete in a specific sport have just never had the opportunity to discover or reach that goal. The "greatest" that we know have made it through a huge set of filters to get to where they are now, though someone else may have made even greater use of those same opportunities.
From the graph, it looks like Europe has a bronze surplus of around 20 medals. Europe won around 1/3 medals and there are 50 bronze medals handed out extra as some, mainly martial arts, sports hand out multiple bronze medals.
Which would account for most of the "extra bronze medals".
My thought exactly. It's just an expected outcome of handing out more bronze than gold and silver every year...
I also wonder about the consistency of who gets gold and silver over the European bronzes. Is it always the same countries winning it all against them?
@@Baselow I haven't done the research, but my bet is that, given enough time, this equalizies to the all-time medal count. As in: Whoever has the most gold medals overall, will also have the most wins over european bronze medalists...
Omg Hank love your hair, you lowkey look like a college student. Also I wanna participate in the Olympics someday!!!!
I Just enjoyed watching it dry throughout the video.
That said, French swimmer Léon Marchand beat one of Michael Phelps's world records in these Olympics, and is also the only athlete who won four gold medals. 😎
"Yeah. I want to be and asset *and* a threat" - Hank Green, 2024
Thanks Hank. I'm feeling miserable and you made me genuinely laugh.