Since the Sydney 2000 Olympics, Ireland’s standing in the Olympics medal tally has ascended an astonishing 45 places. The most decorated Olympics performance for Ireland arrived at the Paris Games, as it progressed from being ranked 64th about two and a half decades ago, when Sonia O’Sullivan secured silver in the women’s 5000-metre run, to 19th. This leap followed Team Ireland’s triumphant return home with four gold and three bronze medals from the Paris event.
Having won four gold medals, this was Ireland’s all-time greatest achievement, twice the tally of golds secured at the Tokyo Games just four years prior. A noteworthy previous accomplishment was at the Atlanta 1996 games, through the efforts of Michelle Smith de Bruin in swimming where she bagged three golds. Despite ensuing contention, these medals held their place in the records.
As shared via the table below, taken at 11pm on a Saturday, the US and China consistently held the top two positions throughout the competition, frequently switching leads from time to time with new medal wins.
A striking feature of Ireland’s medal table standing renders it as one of three nations amongst the top 20 ranks with less than six million inhabitants – the other two being New Zealand and Norway. Ireland’s accolades, in particular when measured per capita, show the nation performing well beyond its size.
When evaluating the total medals won by each nation per capita (for every 10 million individuals), Ireland would climb two positions higher to the 17th spot on the medals chart, boasting 13.7 medals for each 10 million people. Grenada, with a little over 125,000 citizens, achieves the leading position with 166.6 medals per capita, credit to the country’s two bronze medals.
Thorough comparison can be complicated, especially when varied population sizes are to be considered – Dominica being the smallest Olympic-participating country with around 72,734 people and China, the largest, with a population of 1.4 billion. Therefore, analysing medals per 10 million people allows for a more standardised measure of each country’s medal haul relative to their population.
Countries with relatively smaller populations are proving to be outperformers when considered per capita, with the top three highest medal-winning countries having populations less than 200,000 (including Grenada, Dominica, and Saint Lucia [179,861]), all located in the Caribbean region.
Lastly, in a comparison of gold medals per capita, Ireland is rated sixth, while Dominica, Saint Lucia and New Zealand emerge as the top three.