Population size is of second tier importance behind economic factors, and the effect isn’t linear, but an “inverted u” where tiny nations suffer, mid-size to larger nations do better but very large countries fall off due to lack of resources to continually scale investment into ever larger talent pools.
The winter Olympics throws the economic needs of elite sport into sharp focus because unlike athletics, most winter sports require more money for equipment, facilities, training etc to develop high end athletes, poorer countries punch above their weight in things like long-distance running where it’s relatively cheap to train an athlete compared to alpine skiing or ice hockey. Hence why the winter Olympics is dominated by wealthy countries almost all of which are either in Europe, North America or China/Korea/Japan.
The only outliers to that are Brazil who had a downhill skier who competed his whole career for Norway before retiring and deciding to compete again under a different flag and Kazakhstan who (no disrespect to his performance) won because the favourites all unexpectedly messed up.
According to this study: https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/ssqu.13436
Population size is of second tier importance behind economic factors, and the effect isn’t linear, but an “inverted u” where tiny nations suffer, mid-size to larger nations do better but very large countries fall off due to lack of resources to continually scale investment into ever larger talent pools.
The winter Olympics throws the economic needs of elite sport into sharp focus because unlike athletics, most winter sports require more money for equipment, facilities, training etc to develop high end athletes, poorer countries punch above their weight in things like long-distance running where it’s relatively cheap to train an athlete compared to alpine skiing or ice hockey. Hence why the winter Olympics is dominated by wealthy countries almost all of which are either in Europe, North America or China/Korea/Japan.
The only outliers to that are Brazil who had a downhill skier who competed his whole career for Norway before retiring and deciding to compete again under a different flag and Kazakhstan who (no disrespect to his performance) won because the favourites all unexpectedly messed up.