Charlotte MacDonald
speaker
1,889 appearances
62 recordings
1 series
first heard Sep 2010
last heard Apr 2025
Charlotte MacDonald’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Now, that's why some countries underperform, but then there are others that overperform.
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So Megan says that population and GDP will only tell you part of the story.
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It's not just about which countries invest in sport and which don't.
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There are cultural factors at play too.
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For instance, according to Megan's original table, India should be ranked fifth in the world with 34 medals, but in 2008 it got just three.
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Megan says this is partly explained by its low GDP per capita.
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But Professor Dan Johnson from Colorado College in the U.S.
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points out that some countries simply prefer non-Olympic sports.
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If what we want to do is predict the final medal tally as best we can, then we need to put some other things in our model.
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Dan has created such a table by adding two more factors.
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First of all, he measured the difference between what countries should get based on population and GDP and what they really got over the last 60 years.
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He then created an average of winningness, as he calls it, for each country and added that to the model.
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He calls this the cultural specific factor.
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And on top of that, Dan says host countries, perhaps not surprisingly, have an edge.
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So put all that together, and Dan predicts the USA will still come top this time with 99 medals.
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China will get 67, then Russia, then the UK in fourth place with 45.
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More or Less · Has clamping down on drugs made the Tour de France slower? (WS) · 21 Jul 2012
podcast
Well, for those listeners who like to look at the last page of murder mysteries, yes, it is a myth.
For anyone who wants to know why, the first thing to say is that the 18 months claim is related to a similar claim, which is that the earlier you retire, the longer you live.
I have a graph here that's been doing the rounds for a few decades, and I think this graph is typical of this kind of nonsense.
It purports to show that employees of Boeing who retire at 55 will have a life expectancy of 83, while those who leave at 65 will only live for another year and a half.
Showing 1341–1360 of 1,889 · page 68 of 95
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