Demo of how data can tell any story you want, ode to Tokyo
Kaiser completes a challenge: come up with ways to rank any country #1 in the Tokyo Olympics.
A reader sent me to this BBC article, which is typical of a genre that popped up once the Tokyo Olympics closed.
As sports fans know, the United States ended up topping the medals table, whichever way you look at it. But to journalists, that makes for a boring headline.
So, they invented new ways of ranking the countries. For example, using medals per capita, they elevated tiny countries like San Marino to the top. Or, using GDP data, they found China to be the winner.
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In this light-hearted post, I gave myself a challenge: elevate each of those top 10 countries from the official medals table to the top by inventing new metrics; also stick with Olympics data and don't bring in other datasets. What I am demonstrating is that when you have enough dimensions in your dataset, you can pretty much give top rank to anything you want.
My starting point is the official medals table. The United States come up top:
China is #2. But China is top if I look at the average number of golds won per athlete.
ROC came in #3. But ROC is top if we count the average number of medals (any color) won per athlete... and the ROC women did particularly well on this count.
Team GB came in 4th. Nevertheless, I can make them #1 by looking at the breadth of sports in which the British athletes won golds.
Japan, the host nation, ended up #5 on the medals table. But Japan is #1 in terms of the proportion of medals won that were golds.
Things get tougher as we go down the list. But no worries. Data to the rescue.
Australia placed 6th overall in the medals table. When it comes to their women athletes winning golds relative to the men, they outshone the other teams by far.
Italy showed up at #7. But the Azzurri suffered the most close calls of them all, as it had the most silvers and bronzes relative to golds.
Germany was 8th. It has possibly the most disappointing campaign as its gold haul dropped by the most from Rio 2016.
The Netherlands grabbed the 9th spot. In contrast to their neighbor, the Dutch earned the greatest growth in number of medals.
France rounded off the top 10 in the official ranking. But the next host nation is #1 when I look at how much the French men outshone their women in winning medals in Tokyo.
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So I completed my challenge. You can indeed find a way to rank any of these nations #1.
That's a fun way of saying if you have enough dimensions in your dataset, you can pretty much prove anything.
