Wall Street Journal: Professor Johnson’s Medal Standing Prediction; Philippine Olympic Delegates of ONLY 15 Aspirants Reduces Odds For Gold!

The Wall Street Journal recently published the predictions of economist Daniel Johnson, a professor at Colorado College, on the possible totem pole rankings of medals among the participating countries in the Olympics. Professor Johnson was said to have accurately the outcomes during the past Olympic games (summer and winter) since 2000.

As for the basis of Professor Johnson’s model?

From WSJ, ``five basic pieces of data for each participating nation: GDP per capita, total population, political structure (democratic, authoritarian, military or communist), climate (the number of frost days) and home-nation bias.”

In short, economics, politics and environment were mainly used as gauges to predict outcome.

His prediction for the Beijing games?

Courtesy of Wall Street Journal

What significance from this exercise?

According to Professor Johnson as quoted by WSJ, ``what matters most isn’t comparing the take-home medal count of one nation compared to another but instead measuring it against the nation’s own expected performance, based on his metrics. “This is more of a benchmarking analysis than anything else,” he said, to gauge which nations are over- or under-performing their expected totals. Plus, the overall tally is obviously influenced by the size of each nation and how many athletes they train and send to the games. “One reason Botswana doesn’t win a lot of medals is they don’t send a lot of participants each year,” he said.” (highlight mine)

This blog has predicted that socioeconomic conditions seem ripe for the harvest of the ever elusive first Olympic dream gold medal especially in the realm of boxing as discussed in The Socionomics of the First Philippine Olympic Gold Medal-Thank You Manny Pacquiao.

Unfortunately, we learned that with only ONE boxing representative, Harry Tañamor, the odds for attaining such monumental goal vastly dims-(just learned that the others had lost in the prequalifying rounds prior to the Olympics).

Why?

Aside from economics and the sports itself, the quest for the Olympic gold is also about statistical probabilities as qualified by Professor Johnson.

In short, to INCREASE the odds of realizing such dream we need MORE qualified delegates to represent us. The more the entries, the bigger the chances.

Anyway, good luck to our athletes. We will need alot of them.