What Countries have the Least Athletes Per Capita at the Tokyo Olympic Games?
I was watching the opening ceremony for the Olympics last night. As each country walked in they showed the country’s total population and the number of Olympic athletes they had representing their country. This got me thinking, which countries are the least represented in terms of total population? Bangladesh definitely stood out. They only brought six athletes to the Olympics yet have a population of 164 million people. Some of the other island nations also stood out, having populations below 50k but a handful of Olympic athletes. I wanted to see which nations were most and least represented at the olympics based on population size. There was a lot of data out there on medal count but not so much that I could find about number of athletes compared to country’s population size.
To answer the question I pulled a list of athlete counts from here and global population statistics from here and went through and matched up the countries. I had to fill in a couple population sizes, like getting a number 82 million refugees around the world to associate with their 29 Olympic athletes. After matching up the countries’ populations to their athlete count I used a Google Sheets formula to divide the total population by athlete count and sorted descending based on that number. With my chart in hand I pasted the result into the…
