To be fair, Europe gets a bit overrepresented in that regard because it can send loads of athletes as separate countries. To take the men’s mass start speed skating final as an example, ten of the sixteen competitors were from the EU, but it would only be allowed to send two as a single country
On the other hand, Norway alone beat everyone of course, and European countries are eight of the top ten on the medal table
If you look at the statistics for medals per country, they’re quite strongly correlated with numbers of athletes sent. This makes sense because a given athlete can only win 1 medal in 1 event and if you don’t send an athlete to an event you have no chance to win a medal.
This is also the main reason for the host country medal bump: host country’s athletes automatically qualify for a lot of spots in the events. This means they can send more athletes than they otherwise would, so they win more medals than usual.
But the US only completed as one country in each discipline while each country in Europe has the chance to earn a medal for ‘Europe’. To make it comparable, either
each US state would have needed to field their own team and you average over the number of teams or
EU and the US would have needed to compete with one team each per competition
that said, Europe is indeed very successful at the Olympics per capita
If you take Europe as a continent, it beats the USA handily. To make it comparable, the US athletes should be grouped by state. They’d do even worse.
To be fair, Europe gets a bit overrepresented in that regard because it can send loads of athletes as separate countries. To take the men’s mass start speed skating final as an example, ten of the sixteen competitors were from the EU, but it would only be allowed to send two as a single country
On the other hand, Norway alone beat everyone of course, and European countries are eight of the top ten on the medal table
If you look at the statistics for medals per country, they’re quite strongly correlated with numbers of athletes sent. This makes sense because a given athlete can only win 1 medal in 1 event and if you don’t send an athlete to an event you have no chance to win a medal.
This is also the main reason for the host country medal bump: host country’s athletes automatically qualify for a lot of spots in the events. This means they can send more athletes than they otherwise would, so they win more medals than usual.
But the US only completed as one country in each discipline while each country in Europe has the chance to earn a medal for ‘Europe’. To make it comparable, either
each US state would have needed to field their own team and you average over the number of teams or
EU and the US would have needed to compete with one team each per competition
that said, Europe is indeed very successful at the Olympics per capita
The Winter Olympics, which essentially requires snow and mountains to be successful. And it’s extremely expensive to do those sports.
Or ice, the good type.