Slovenia tops our interactive medals table - with one gold medal

Last Modified: 19 Aug 2008
By: Channel 4 News

If you're fed up with seeing China at the top of the Olympic medals board, try our interactive medals table. Alice Tarleton explains.

Britain is riding high in the official medal tables, with its largest gold medal haul in 100 years.

But is it really fair to compare the success of Team GB to that of smaller and poorer countries?

Channel 4 News's alternative tables rank country's performance according to their population, GDP and human rights records, and these show a different success map.

Slovenia may have just one gold medal, two silver and two bronze to its name so far, but with a population of just 2.01 million, this puts it to the top of the table weighted for population.

Slovenia may have just one gold medal, but with a population of just 2.01 million this puts it top of the table weighted for population.

Jamaica (two golds and three silvers between 2.8 million people) and Bahrain (one gold for 720,000 citizens) take the silver and bronze spots on the population-weighted podium. Britain, with 60.94 million to share out 16 golds, 9 silvers and 8 bronzes trails in 17th place.

North Korea takes the lead based on national income. The country has notched up two golds, one silver and three bronzes, and has a GDP of US$2.2bn. Zimbabwe is in second place, with one gold, three silvers and a GDP of $3.418bn, and Mongolia (one gold, one silver and $3.894 GDP.

Britain comes a humble 43rd, with the recent gold rush struggling to offset our comparatively comfortable GDP of more than $2,728bn.

China's low score of 6.5 pushes it into ninth place in the human rights table.

The United States tops the human rights-weighted table, which uses political rights and civil liberties-based ratings from US organisation Freedom House. Australia takes third place, after Britain - all of the top three countries score the best possible ranking, one.

Current Olympic table leader China gets a low human-rights score of 6.5 (out of a possible seven), pushing them into ninth place.

Gallingly for loyal Brits, Antipodean rival Australia holds top spot in the table of tables, which combines all these factors. Jamaica and Slovakia take second and third positions, while Britain holds a respectable fourth. China and the USA languish in 23rd and 24th places respectively.