The Stolenwealth Games are over with for another four years when it will get passed onto a nation that was once part of Betty's Empire which has already hosted it before. Predictably the medal tables were topped by England and Australia but it's stupid to compare medals won by countries with huge populations to those with small populations.
If there were two schools in your town and you had to choose which one you would send your children to, you wouldn't choose the one where 50 out of 500 children had received all A grades over a school where 20 out of 100 children received A grades. So the same is true for the Stolenwealth Games.
The first thing to do when looking to do a per capita comparison is to google to see if anyone else has already done the donkey work. Fortunately the good people who work for
Stats New Zealand have done this. Presumably they like to do this so they can stick two fingers up at the country next door with a much larger population which is of course both childish and very convenient as that's what we're about to do.
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Total golds per million. Share via twitter
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As you can see, as soon as you compare medals per capita Wales shoots up to 8th. In the overall
medal table Wales was 13th. Comparatively speaking Wales did win a huge amount of silver and bronze medals.
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| Total medals per million. Share via twitter |
Now we're up to 5th with only countries with tiny populations ahead of us, tiny even by our standards. You couldn't even measure these in 'size of Wales' comparisons. But then I started thinking what the results would be like if we were to pretend that Wales wasn't competing and instead we were lumped together as Team GB. You know, like all the other competitions because we are too scared to be an independent country.
So here we have Scotland with an incredible haul of gold medals leading Wales. Then if Team GB had entered instead of us all it would have won just 1.32 gold medals per million people. More than both Northern Ireland and England achieved. So in this scenario both Wales and Scotland have achieved better results on their own that if we had all been lumped together as Team GB.
With silver medals it turns out that Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland all achieved a better tally than if we had been lumped in with Team GB. Only England would have benefited in this scenario.
And the same is true for Bronze medals, Wales won four times as many bronze medals per million people than the UK would have if Team GB had entered. Again only England would have benefited from this scenario.
It's getting a bit familiar now, only one nation would once again benefit from being part of Team GB. Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland have all achieved more medals per million people than if we were part of Team GB.
Now of course it wouldn't be like this at the Olympic Games with all those good countries taking part. But wouldn't you all rather lose to the USA and China as part of your own country than lose as part of Team GB?
And then when we did win a medal, wouldn't it be that much more special to win with Cymru written across your top rather than Team GB. Wouldn't it be more special having Hen Wlad Fy Nhadau played on the podium rather than that dirge to Betty. Wouldn't it be amazing to see Y Ddraig Goch flown on the podium instead of the Union Rag. Wouldn't it just be great to be from Wales whether you won or lost and not, as at present, just when you lose?
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