What do the Olympic awards mean?

In exactly one year's time, the Olympic Summer Games will start in Paris.  The whole world will be watching the successes of their countries' athletes every day. The competitors will have their own motivation which differs depending on countries.

For example, for the former USSR countries, medallists of the Olympic Games are entitled to solid cash prizes and in addition cars. It is not uncommon for Olympians from the former Soviet Union to enjoy huge government rewards such as apartments. Other countries also often give cash prizes and their size naturally depends on the economic well-being of the country itself. However, there are some exceptions. For example, the OCs of Sweden, Great Britain, New Zealand, and Norway do not provide direct monetary incentives to their athletes for winning an Olympic medal and render only moral support. The most important moral reward for the winner, of course, is the Olympic medal and the ceremony itself, during which the flags of the countries are raised and the anthem of the country whose representative won the Olympic gold medal is played.

During the original Olympic games in ancient Greece, champions were not awarded gold, silver, and bronze medals as they are today. The winners were instead given jewelry or money.  As for the tradition of awarding medals, it was introduced shortly before the first games in 1894 during the Olympic Congress.

Medal counting has been done for a long time, but with the advent of the internet it is mostly done on the official websites of the hosts of the Olympics and these tables usually attract a lot of interest from sports fans all over the world. So what do these lists tell us? Are they an indicator of the development of sport in a given country or ego-pleasing figures? Let's try to figure it out.

Here, for example, is the list of medals from the last Olympics in Tokyo. It is worth noting that the hosts of the last Olympics, the Japanese, made the medal table relatively democratic and the user can set filters himself, arranging the countries alphabetically or putting the countries with the least number of medals at the top of it.

The so-called leaders in this table, as we can see, are countries with large populations - the USA, China, Russia, and the UK. The Netherlands, with its relatively small population of 10 million, is rather an exception in this company. Of course, it's nice to see your country ahead of the rest, but some experts have long been urging the public to move towards a fairer system for assessing the sporting success of countries at the Olympic Games. For example, one that takes into the number of Olympic medals per country's population. This seems to be quite fair. Otherwise, how can one compare the sports successes of one and a half billion China and small Grenada.

As we can see from the table, the most successful in this indicator were not giants such as China and the United States, but modest island states. It should be noted that the leaders of the quantitative list of the United States have one medal per 3 million people, China – one medal per 15 million, and Russia -  one medal per 2 million.

Naturally, the large-scale commercialization of the Games and its politicization led to the fact that the achievement of results, both sporting and commercial, has become almost the main measure of the success of modern athletes, which of course runs counter to the bright ideals of the Olympics of the era of Pierre Coubertin. However, despite this, the Olympics, along with the Football World Cup, remains the main sporting event in the world today, attracting a multi-million audience of spectators all over the globe.