[qxamak]

> It reveals that you are more likely to become an olympic medalist if you are from the Caribbean, Scandinavia, certain Eastern European countries, Australia and New Zealand, than if you are Chinese, American or Russian.

Sure. But is that the same as "producing great athletes"? Many of the Caribbean nations also have populations that are ~100x smaller than the US, Russia, or China. Russia would need to win 430 medals (nearly half of the total medal count) just to compete with the Bahamas winning 1 medal based on this metric.

Caribbean countries tend to do very well in track and field sports, but they don't send many athletes to compete in other sports. So it might be more informative to see the number of olympic qualifiers for each country (not just medal count) per capita. But I'm not sure that would be much better at determining which country produces the best athletes.

There's so many confounding factors in the data that it's difficult to draw any real conclusions. I still find these kinds of statistics interesting though.