INTERNATIONAL OLYMPIC ACADEMY 7th JOINT - IOA

AN OLYMPIC INDEX: A COMPARISON OF
PERFORMANCES AT THE OLYMPIC GAMES (1992 - 2000)
1. Introduction
Ms Sylvie LEBLICQ (BEL)
The purpose of the Olympic Index is to create an objective
measure to compare the performances of the athletes from comparable
countries. To define which countries are comparable to Belgium, two
criteria are used (De Bosscher, 2002), namely the Gross Domestic
Product per capita and the population of a country. Countries with a
GDP/capita that is 30% higher or lower than Belgian’s GDP are taken
into account. This means that a GDP/capita between 11.170$ and
32.890$ is considered to be comparable with Belgium. Besides this,
the population of the countries that are taken into account has to be
two times bigger or smaller than Belgian’s population. This means a
population between 5.130 million and 20.518 million of inhabitants.
Taking into account these criteria, five countries can be considered
as comparable with Belgium. Table 1 gives an overview of these five
countries with their specifications (De Bosscher, 2002).
Table 1: Overview of the countries which are comparable to Belgium
(De Bosscher, 2002)
Country GDP/CAP ($)
Population
(inhabitants)
Australia 23.200 19.358
Belgium 25.300 10.259
Denmark 25.500 5.353
Sweden 22.000 8.875
Switzerland 28.600 7.283
The Netherlands 24.400 15.981
In this paper an international comparison will be made between
the Belgian performances and the performances of the five countries
listed in table 1. To compose this Olympic Index, the results of the last
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