The Tale of Two Nordic Elite Sport Extremes

Charles P. Theuer’s Medal Count: The Fate of Nations at the Olympics offers an insightful, statistical perspective on variables that explain the Olympic medal count of a nation. Among some other countries, the book takes an especially close look at Norway as the leading example of things done right in elite sport.

Norway, as most sport enthusiasts likely know, is on top of the medal count per capita, unchallenged even by larger, extremely successful countries like the US or China. As a Finn living in Norway and working at the Norwegian School of Sport Sciences, it is easy to see the difference in the quality of the elite sport system compared to Finland, a country that, broadly speaking, is not that different from Norway as a society; yet we have started to fail¹ at medaling at the Summer Olympics – culminating in a total of zero medals from Paris 2024. From the latest Winter edition, we won 8. Norway, in comparison, took 8 summer medals and whopping 37 winter ones. That is a lot of medals.

From Zero to Hero?

Failing at something that is seen important, well, sucks. Being successful at Olympic sports certainly is something most, if not, all countries value. In fact, the Ministry of Education and Culture in Finland² even started a complete overhaul of the national elite sport system with the Finnish Olympic Committee as a response to the lack of success in Paris – seen even as a national catastrophe – and established an expert group within the ministry to assist in the development of the overall elite sport landscape in the country with hopes to at some point to even catch up with our beloved neighbor³.

This is where Medal Count’s analysis becomes particularly valuable.

Important Factors

Some factors in Theuer’s book seem intuitively obvious at first glance – such the gross domestic product (GDP) per capita of the country and the sheer size of the population. Elite sport is much about gaining competitive advantage, and this requires many kinds of resources – human, research, equipment, and so on, but most importantly, financial.

A country also needs a big enough pool of athletes that compete. Every Olympic level athlete is an outlier, a statistical exception, and with a small pool of athletes, the likelihood of finding these rare exceptions becomes even less likely. But these factors alone don’t suffice or guarantee medals.

Norway, blessed with great reservoirs of oil, is for sure wealthy and thus has a top GDP per capita. Finland’s GDP is a measly 3/5 of what Norway has⁴. Then again, not every wealthy country is exceptional at winning Olympic medals, like Luxembourg, with the highest GDP per capita of all countries, as Theuer points out.

Norway is not a big country by population. In fact, there are a tiny bit less Norwegians than Finns, both having populations around 5.5 million. On average, there is an Olympic medal per 5.9 million people, so Norway gets around 48 times more medals than the simple average would predict. Again, that is quite a high number.

Maximal athlete empowerment

Theuer points out that what truly matters is maximal athlete empowerment. It is a strategic approach to having an elite sport system; a way to optimize the medal output even with countries with different GDPs, populations, and so on. While genetics plays a role in success, it is more important to have a broad accessibility funnel, e.g. having children provided access to a wide variety of Olympic sports. An optimal system takes on as many people as possible and keeps them onboard sport to make sure that no (genetic or other) talent is left unidentified.

The next step is termed as the advanced training funnel, through which the identified talents flow to the greener pastures of top-quality coaching, sport infrastructure, and the possibility to devote their time to gaining the competitive advantage.

Thirdly, a repeat champion funnel creates a sustainability loop that aims to ensure that champions keep being champions in the later editions of the Olympic Games.

A Chance for Success

These are also something, according to Theuer, Norway excels at. My anecdotal experience in Finland, however, suggests a systemic difference: while the sport system in Norway funnels talent into elite sport and maintains it, in Finland, the successful talents tend to more or less self-identify and succeed despite the system. This does not, of course, apply to every sport.

Maybe, and hopefully, the two tales will not remain comparatively extreme but begin to converge in the future. Personally, I find it wonderful to have the Norwegian success story showing others the way on how a small nation can achieve contemporary Olympic success. But real changes don’t happen with cosmetic fixes based on superficial interpretations of how things work elsewhere. Instead, changes happen by knowledge emerging from quality research and solid facts. Theuer’s book is an example of evidence-based research that contributes to understanding and defining the current status of elite sport in a country from a systemic point of view.

Footnotes

1. Not to be taken as a critique against the athletes – the decline has deeply systemic roots. Claiming an Olympian did not turn every stone to succeed prior and during the Olympics – well, that is crazy talk and to be outright dismissed.
2. For transparency, the author is a member of the said group.
3. Or even with Sweden…
4. The number is not that small when one looks at the big picture, as Finland is in top 20 worldwide.