Which Olympic sports is China good at?
On July 29th Lian Junjie and Yang Hao (pictured) leapt off a ten-metre-high platform, twisting and flipping in near-perfect synchronisation. Before the Olympic judges even posted their marks, Chinese fans celebrated. Then it became official: the pair had won gold, beating divers from Britain. China has won 50 gold medals in the sport of diving over the years, more than any other country.
Olympic medals are a source of prestige for China. The country boycotted the games for decades because of the participation of Taiwan, which China claims. When China returned in the 1980s it won fewer medals than its size seemed to warrant. But as China grew richer, the state poured resources into the training of athletes. Some have also been accused of doping. The upshot is that China’s share of gold medals at the summer games has risen from 2% in 1988 to 11% in 2021.
China’s success tends to be concentrated in a handful of disciplines. Using statistics compiled by Olympedia, a database of results, we analysed the country’s performance at the summer games from 1992 to 2021. We assigned points for each medal handed out (three for gold, two for silver and one for bronze), then calculated China’s share of these points, or dominance score, in each sport. A score of one means China won every medal in a sport; a score of zero indicates that it won none.
China dominates sports such as table tennis and badminton (see chart 1), winning over half of the Olympic medals ever awarded in the former. In diving China hopes to win most, if not all, of the eight golds on offer this year. Elsewhere in the pool, though, Chinese athletes are less buoyant. The country’s swimming team, which is the focus of doping allegations, won just 7% of medal points in 2021.
We wondered if the sports that China was good at had anything in common. To find out, we sorted events into various (non-exclusive) categories according to their characteristics, then built a model to see if these categories could explain China’s performance. Chart 2 shows how China’s dominance score moves up or down based on a sport’s inclusion in a category, all else being equal. (We excluded sports introduced since 2016 for lack of data.)
China does better in sports played indoors compared with those played outside. It is bad at sports that involve physical contact between competitors and at big-team sports (three players or more in our definition). China does well in events that are scored by judges. We expected the results to show that it focuses on sports where there are lots of medals up for grabs—the better to increase its total. But its dominance score actually drops by 0.08 if a sport features more than five events.
America, in contrast, excels at team sports. Where a sport is played or if it is judged has no statistically significant effect on the performance of its athletes. America’s wins are also spread more widely. This may reflect differences in the countries’ sporting regimes. China relies on a training system that throws the state’s weight behind a few elite athletes. America has a more diffuse system which encourages participation in a wide range of sports.
After five days of competition, China has won more gold medals than America. But that lead may not last. ■
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