Which countries are better at the Winter Olympics than the Summer Olympics?

From Reddit (posted by u/RoadyHouse): Which Olympic Games are these European countries the best?

This is a map which shades countries:

• blue if they’ve won more gold medals in the Winter Olympics than the Summer Olympics
• yellow if they’ve won more gold medals in the Summer Olympics than the Winter Olympics
• red if they’ve won no gold medals

The only blue countries are Norway, Austria, Switzerland, and Liechtenstein. These certainly seem like a wintry set of countries (one of the big tourist attractions in Oslo is the ski jumping hill) but surely, say, Sweden should be on here? Or the Dutch with the speed skating? Or Canada? Do they even have summer there?

(A side note about that ski jumping hill – you can take the subway to it. But then you have to climb up a hill to get there! This is obvious in retrospect – of course the ski jumping hill would be on a hill! – but it was still exhausting. Also, they don’t really explain why ski jumping is a thing. I assume it involves young men and alcohol.)

The answer is that there are just a lot more events in the Summer Olympics than the Winter Olympics (and the Summer Olympics have been going on longer). So there have been 5,121 gold medals awarded all-time in the Summer Olympics but only 1,062 in the Winter Olympics, according to the all-time medal table at Wikipedia.

Consider for example Sweden. They’ve won 148 summer gold medals out of the total of 5,121, or 2.89% of all summer gold medals.

They’ve won 57 out of the 1,062 winter gold medals, or 5.36% of all winter gold medals.

So it’s reasonable to say that Sweden is better at the winter Olympics than the summer Olympics. If you wanted to put a number on it, 5.36%/2.89% = 185% so you could say they’re 85% better at winter than summer.

If I’ve done it right, the list of countries that are better at the winter Olympics than the summer Olympics are, in order from most: Liechtenstein (their only gold medals ever are in winter), Austria, Norway, Switzerland, Canada, Belarus, Czech Republic, Netherlands, Germany, Finland, Estonia, Sweden, South Korea, Russia, Slovakia, Croatia, East Germany, Slovenia, Latvia.

Do you like maps? Here that is as a map.

I’m not surprised that this list is so Eurocentric. The Soviet Union, West Germany, Italy, and France just barely miss it. (I haven’t made any effort to merge together the various Germanies, or deal with the Soviet Union and its various successor states.). Many Winter Olympic sports have a high barrier to entry just in terms of what facilities are available – to take an extreme example there are only fifteen luge tracks in the world – and lots of countries just don’t have enough winter to have winter sports. So this is essentially a map of rich, cold countries. As one reporter put it during the 2018 Olympics, “From a sports perspective, Norway is rich as shit“.

Mountains help too – Denmark has 48 summer gold medalists but no winter gold medalists. Maybe the Danes should take up speed skating like the Dutch.

(This post originated as a Reddit comment. Map made using mapchart.net.)