Population and Asian Games medals

Having read your editorial of Dec. 21, Games people play, it was with curiosity that I conducted a simple "study" to verify if there is any correlation between country population versus number of medals awarded during the 13th Asian Games 1998 in Bangkok.

Thanks to Cyberspace, especially to the site 1997 World Factbooks, I gathered the relevant data of certain countries in respect to land area, population, percentage of people with ages 15 to 64, etc., for a July 1997 estimate.

Greatly simplifying things by thinking that either gold, silver or bronze was just a matter of fortune or luck, I decided to limit the study to total medals only. In the 13th Asian Games medal tally, there were 33 countries with at least one medal, with a total 1,226 medals distributed. Compiling all the data, I came up with 2,139,044,683 for total population of the 33 medal- awarded countries.

After playing around and plotting the seemingly relevant data in a spreadsheet, I ended up with no direct correlation between awarded medals versus either country population or population density. I did check the latter just to see if Indonesia is too dense to play sports compared to other higher rank countries.

This may symbolically be interpreted as all people, once upon an imaginary time, were of equal quality in sports, where achievement purely depends on population.

With this approach, I derived that the number of people entitled to a medal was 1,744,735 per medal. Calculating further, Indonesia, with 136,353,190 people aged 15 to 64, should be considered "just qualified" if it is awarded 78 medals. Applying this to a few other countries, Thailand, Malaysia, Japan, South Korea and China, each are entitled to 24, 7, 50, 19 and 476 medals respectively.

Indonesia, with only 27 medals awarded out of its "entitlement" of 78, in contrast with Japan, 181 out of 50, looks in reality far below the "just qualified" level by a "quality" factor of 0.35 (27 divided by 78). Or, we "redundantly" need more people to reach the "just qualified" level by a "redundant" factor of 2.89 (78 divided by 27).

Meanwhile, Japan and other countries which got more than their "entitlement", need much less people for being "just qualified", as indicatively shown by their individual "redundant" factors of much less than 1.

Analyzing further, it is interesting to note that from the ranked first 15 countries, only five have "redundant" factors bigger than 1. They are Sri Lanka (1.18), China (1.74), Indonesia (2.89), and India (9.66). The remaining countries' factors are less than 1. The smallest is 0.11, for both South Korea and Taiwan. Thailand and Malaysia have "redundant" factors of 0.26 and 0.24 respectively. For China, its huge population fortunately compensates its considerable "redundant" factor, and helped it to first place.

I would be very happy if the above analysis could help the people in charge of our national sports management realize that there is still a lot to study and take into consideration as input to development of our national sports. Our high "redundant" factor indicates that we are still far from nationwide success in intensively motivating, educating and training sports people, even for a regionally "just qualified" level.

For me, these results partially satisfy my curiosity as to why it has been difficult for us to set up a quality 11-player soccer team. With a "redundant" factor of 2.89, to have a "just qualified" 11-player team, we might have to physically put 32 (2.89 times 11) players in our soccer team.

ATTILA RAHAYOE

Bekasi, West Java