The 2024 Paris Olympics have drawn to a close and according to the official medal tally the world’s three largest economies have dominated the podium spots – the USA, China and Japan.

But that’s not the only way to measure success at the world’s foremost sporting event; indeed in some ways it’s unsurprising that countries with more resources and people win the most medals.

But what would the medal rankings look like if they were adjusted for Gross Domestic Product (GDP) and population, which give some nations big advantages over others?

The short answer is very different.

One measure by University of Newcastle professor Bill Mitchell has  weighted medals by GDP, finding Caribbean nations like Dominica, Grenada and Jamaica were ahead of the US, China and Japan.

The differences are stark; Jamaica for instance – which won three gold, two silver and six bronze – had $US8.5 billion in GDP for each weighted medal won, compared to $US281 billion for the USA.

In other words, Jamaica’s performance at the Olympics was orders of magnitude more efficient relative to the scale of their economy than the US.

Ranking that shows Australia on top

Australia and New Zealand are also standouts when medals are measured in economic scale and population – it’s clear both countries punched above their weight in the past two weeks.

Another measure seeking a deeper understanding of Olympic performance demonstrates this too.

Called the Duncan-Parece model for its authors, who have published findings in academic journals, this method assigns a probability scale to Olympic medals that adjusts for population.

This seeks to provide a medal ranking that isn’t just topped by the biggest countries and also does not overly represent countries with tiny economies, which per capita GDP rankings can do.

“Probability ranking highlights the best performers across the wide range of national populations,” the authors of the model say on their explanatory site.

“It measures the improbability that a country of a given population would win as many medals as it has, or more medals, if all people in competitive countries worldwide had equal medal-winning capabilities.”

On this measure, Australia has emerged as the top performer coming out of the Paris Olympics.

With a population of 26.7 million, Australia would be expected to win just 3.7 medals at Paris, but in the country took home an astonishing 53 medals, including 18 first-place (gold) medals.

Australia won the first two days and the last six days of events over the 16 days of competition.

And on those days Australia did not come first. The nation came second to host nation France.

But the Duncan-Parece model also shows that overall winner, the United States, also performed relatively well.

They were expected to win 48 medals but actually secured 126 medals in Paris.

The model is least favourable to India, which based on its population would be expected to win 203 medals, but only won six.

China, which ranked second overall, is second last with 91 medals compared to an expected 201 based on its population.

That shows that there’s no one single measure that’s best for understanding Olympic performance and that the entire data set is ultimately also about the framing of the event.

India, for example, is the world’s second most populous nation and the fifth largest economy by GDP, but historically has not been at the forefront of sports that are on show at the Olympics.

That’s partly because the most popular sport in India, cricket, is not an Olympic event.

This will change in 2028 at the Olympics in Los Angeles, however, with the sport set to feature.