engleski

Winning medals at the Olympic games - does Croatia have any chance?

As the Olympic Games were developing and their popularity and relevance grew winning medals also became important and a matter of national and political prestige. Despite International Olympic Committee’ s refusal to recognize countries rankings by medals, the medal table is updated on a regular basis and plays a dominant role in media coverage and public interest (Rathke and Woitek, 2007). Naturally, this has led researchers to explore the socioeconomic, cultural and geographic underpinnings of Olympic success. The aim of this paper is to review the current state of the research on factors that influence national Olympic Games success. Majority of studies consider variables like: population, GDP and GDP per capita, hosting or neighboring country advantage, political system, sports system, health expenditure per capita, climate, etc., as factors that potentially have impacts on a countries’ medal count. The research has shown that economical factor, mainly GDP per capita, has statistically significant influence on the explanation of numbers of medals won by a certain country at the Olympic Games, as does the political system, but the influence of population size was not confirmed. Having in mind mentioned factors it is unlikely for Croatia to significantly increase the number of the Olympic medals in the future.

Olympic medals; GDP; population size; political system

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