Using athletes' world rankings to assess countries' performance.

Area of Science:

• Sports Science
• Performance Analytics
• Olympic Studies

Background:

• Traditional country sport performance measures often focus solely on medal counts.
• This overlooks the contributions and potential of athletes who do not win medals.

Purpose of the Study:

• To develop an inclusive and fair measure of country sport performance.
• The proposed measure is based on athlete ranks within the sport of swimming.

Main Methods:

• Collected top-150 ranks in Olympic swimming events from 1990-2011.
• Developed an athlete performance score (approximated by 1/rank) based on the proportion of athletes achieving top rank.
• Calculated country scores by summing individual athlete scores across all events and assessed reliability and validity.

Main Results:

• An athlete's performance potential score was accurately represented by the inverse of their rank (1/rank).
• Country scores derived from summing 1/rank demonstrated high reliability and validity.
• The method scored 168 countries at the 2012 Olympics, significantly more than the 17 countries that won medals.

Conclusions:

• A fair and inclusive measure of country performance potential was developed using swimming data.
• This ranking-based method is adaptable for assessing countries in other sports with established world rankings or major competitions.