this post was submitted on 22 Feb 2026
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Norway (population: 5.7m) beats US (342m) to top Winter Olympics medal table (www.theguardian.com)
submitted 5 hours ago by NomNom@feddit.uk to c/europe@feddit.org
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[โ€“] Ontimp@feddit.org 3 points 2 hours ago* (last edited 1 hour ago)

But consider this:

Let's say the raw talent in e.g. Skeleton bob are normally distributed around the world.

So of the top 10000 most talented people in Skeleton, about 1700 of those would be born in China, about 6 in Norway - a factor of about 280x difference.

So to offset the 'natural talent' disadvantage of low population size, Norway would need to be 280x more effective in discovering the talent available in their population than China.

And I think that's pretty reasonable to suppose; consider e.g. likelihood of being exposed to a highly specific winter sport in your youth, likelihood of living in a geographical area where talent could show itself (i.e. the mountains), likelihood your family has the material means to support a niche winter sport in the first place until you are discovered, etc.

By my rough estimate, any of these likelihoods are way higher for any given Norwegian child due to cultural, socio-economic and other structural factors.

So while e.g. China might have the greater raw pool of talent in Skeleton compared to Norway, at the end of the day, Norway probably offsets this through better talent discovery in this niche discipline. So the raw talent of the roster of people walking into the Olympic training camps is likely pretty comparable.

(Note that this argument is not about China, Norway, or Skeleton specifically but about nieces and structural filters in talent discovery. In a discipline like 200m free style swimming where China has massive discovery potential the numbers of course weigh considerably heavier)