Soon after the Beijing 2008 Olympics commenced, I began regularly updating this Beijing 2008 Olympic Medal Count data set. The tally chart proved very popular and has seen more than 10,000 views, but then I thought I'd add another slant to the data by looking at the results in terms of the size of each country's population or economy.

So, I tracked down some population data on wikipedia, correcting a few of the figures with reference to the CIA World Factbook (I'd have taken it all from there if I could work out an easy way to download all the data). I found world gross domestic product (GDP) data provided by the world bank, and uploaded the results to Swivel. Shortly afterwards, I created a second data set which included medals per million population and medals per trillion US dollars GDP. This is one of the charts based on that data set.

After a bit of jostling, exchanging places with the Bahamas, Jamaica came out third in the ranking of medals per capita and second in terms of medals per trillion dollars of GDP. It would be first if Zimbabwe's economy wasn't such a basket case! So, in the adjusted Olympic medal tally, I'd nominate Jamaica as the clear winner.

For more charts and more discussion, read this blog post. (Note that the GDP data is in US dollars.)