Rio’s most successful countries by size

The real medal table is medals per capita.

Marcus Roberts | Aug 25 2016 | comment

Now that the Olympics are done and dusted and most of the althetes have gone home (apart from those still in police custody...) it is time to have a look at the medal table to see who can take bragging rights from their pharmaci...I mean, althetes performance. And you can see that the top ten is filled with the usual suspects: USA, Great Britain, China, Russia, Germany, Japan, France, South Korea, Italy and Australia. But really that list doesn't count because it doesn't take into account the vast disparity in human resources between countries. And that's where the real medal table comes in: the medals per capita. And we see that the Rio Olympics were very much a Carribean affair. On the medals per capita list the top ten is very different: Grenada, Bahamas, Jamaica, New Zealand (hurrah! it was in fact New Zealand's most successful games in terms of total medals won - 18), Denmark, Croatia, Slovenia, Georgia, Azerbaijan and Hungary. Hardly world powerhouses. In fact Great Britain came 19th on this list and the USA came 42nd. Now they just need to do a list based upon medals per government dollars spent on sports.

He was an effective, if vulgar, speaker, and seems to have been given to extravagant promises and extravagant accusations against opponents. He was one of the first of a new kind of politician, who were not from the old aristocracy, and whose predominance depended on persuasive speeches in the assembly and lawcourts rather than on regular office-holding.

That could almost be a description of Donald Trump; substitute the election rally and the television networks for the assembly and the lawcourts and it comes close. In fact, it’s the scholarly consensus about Cleon, one of the original “demagogues”, who lived 2,500 years ago and who, according to the historian Thuycidides, “stood out among the Athenians for the violence of his character.”

Today’s article by Chris Mackie suggests there is some justice in the comparison of Cleon and Trump. The implications in terms of big issues like war are drastic. Of course, one never really knows with Trump what the next violent swing of opinion on the Middle East, or Muslims or any other issue will be. Perhaps Cleon was more predictable.