The USA did just fine at the World Track and Field Championships in London. Maybe better than fine. No one dropped a relay baton, so that’s an improvement. And the USA is still the runaway leader in the Perpetual Medal … Continue reading Russia up, Canada down in Perpetual Medal Count
How are each country’s Olympic athletes trending in World Championship and other competition? Glad you asked. As it stands now, U.S. athletes are doing quite well, tracking a good bit ahead of how they finished in Rio 2016. So are … Continue reading Presenting the Perpetual Medal Count
NBC’s Nick Zaccardi has taken care of something I had planned to do, rounding up this winter’s World Championship results into a medal projection. His numbers: 34 Germany 28 USA 27 Norway 26 Canada 22 France Compare this to the most recent Virtual Medal Table from Gracenote, which compiles all results: 34 Germany 34 Norway 31 USA 29 Canada (only 5 gold) 23 Russia I haven’t done a full-fledged projection (and I might not), but I’ll take a quick pass through the World Championship results and assign a plus or minus to Nick’s count: ALPINE SKIING Medals won: 3 Mikaela Shiffrin: … Continue reading 2018 medal projections: 31 today
Yes, SportsMyriad will have medal projections in 2016, but we’re doing things a little differently. Note the “we.” Not “I.” I’m getting help. As preparation for the projections, I did a few searches on every Summer Olympic sport today. It’s difficult. So many summer sports are also recreational, and it’s hard to find coverage of the ISATWHATEVER World Cup amid all the stuff geared toward the practitioner, not the fan. Other sports are far more popular outside the Olympics. Here’s what you find for each sport: Archery: “I killed a bear. Check out these photos.” Badminton: China, China, China, hey, can we … Continue reading What happens when you search for Olympic sports
The World Championships are all over bar the shouting. And people are shouting about Qatar — the country you know as the dubiously selected FIFA World Cup host in 2022 but now known as the country that bought a bunch of ringers for its handball team, bought a bunch of fans for this tournament and got so many questionable calls in its favor that one beaten opponent sarcastically applauded the refs. That was after the powers that be realized Germany wasn’t in the tournament, so Oceania champion Australia was unceremoniously dumped so the handball-watching country could get a wild card. Like South Korea’s soccer team after … Continue reading 2016 medal projections: Handball (men’s)
Ten days until the men’s handball World Championships! That’s the first of many events that will feed into the 2016 medal projections this year. By the end of the year, I’ll have every Rio event projected. Even SuperBacteria Sailing. Wikipedia rounds up nearly everything that matters in 2015, but I’ll focus here on medal projection events, mostly World Championships. Jan. 15-Feb. 1: Men’s handball Worlds, Qatar. Winner qualifies for Olympics. Feb. 18-22: Track cycling Worlds, Saint-Quentin-en-Yvelines. Olympic qualifying is based on rankings. April 14-19: Equestrian dressage and jumping World Cup finals, Las Vegas. The World Equestrian Games are in even non-Olympic years. The other Olympic … Continue reading Medal projection fever: Events that matter in 2015
Can we really come up with a statistical model for projecting Olympic medals? I’ve often joked that I want to be the Nate Silver of Olympic medal projections. But Nate knows a lot more about stats than I do — I never took a single class in the subject, and I just hack my way through spreadsheets on the basis of some self-teaching and the occasional journalists’ seminar. (Did I just ruin my chances of getting hired to consult at the new FiveThirtyEight?) Since Sochi, I’ve embarked on a bit more self-teaching in spreadsheets and stats. At the same time, … Continue reading Medal projections: Stats vs. subjectivity
Olympic stats wizard Bill Mallon has quantified the host-nation bounce, showing that the country that last hosted the Olympics can typically expect to win roughly 70% of the medals it won at home. The genius of this analysis is that it factors out the growth of the Games (particularly winter) by analyzing the medal count in terms of percentage of medals won. So if the Olympics add 30 events for 2018 (don’t worry — it won’t happen), then sure, Russia could match its Sochi record count. But the percentage of available medals won should drop. When you’re projecting medals event-by-event, … Continue reading Olympic medals: The host-nation bounce is real
How did the Olympic results compare with all the things we could use to predict them? Glad you asked: [gview file=”https://duresport.files.wordpress.com/2014/03/2014-projection-analysis-as-m-dh.pdf”%5D And this: [gview file=”http://www.sportsmyriad.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/03/2014-projection-analysis-AS-M-SG.pdf”%5D Basically, I’m comparing three different types of results: 1. Majors: How skiers fared in the last Olympics and the last two World Championships. The number in “Majors” is a median — it ignores any null results, and the 2013 World Championships are counted twice so that they’ll be weighted more heavily. 2. Cup: Median of the last four World Cup seasons, with the last two counted twice so they’ll be weighted more heavily. 3. 13-14: The 2013 and 14 World … Continue reading 2014 medal projections: Some excruciating details
The biggest differences between the Sochi medal projections and the Sochi medal count were: USA – Speedskating: Projected 7, got 0. In the other direction, there’s sliding sports: Projected 3, got 7. Norway – Cross-country skiing: Projected 18, got 11. Also biathlon: Projected 12, got 6. Netherlands – Speedskating: Projected 14, got 23. The only other projected or actual medal: They picked one up in short-track. Germany – Sliding sports: Projected 11, got 5. Sweden – Cross-country skiing: Projected 5, got 11. South Korea – Short-track: Projected 9, got 5. And speedskating: Projected 5, got 2. France – Action sports: … Continue reading Where the Olympic medals came from and went
