How well do host nations perform in their home Olympic games?
The 2024 Summer Olympic Games are right around the corner with the official torch relay already underway. This summer’s festivities will be the third Summer Games that Paris has hosted and France’s sixth time hosting the modern Games in general. France has been pretty successful when hosting the Summer Olympics, receiving their best two table finishes in the years that they hosted. That got us wondering how much hosting the Games impacts a country's chances to win medals. We took a look through the history of the modern Games to find out.
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Hosting the Summer Olympics provides better advantage than Winter Games
One thing became immediately clear; hosting the Olympics does usually lead to winning more medals that year. That makes sense as the nation holding the Games gets automatic entrants into most events. The real question is how well do they perform in relation to the number of athletes they have participating. The table below shows the percentage of athletes sent and medals won by the host nation in comparison to their averages across all year’s Games.
As this chart shows, the advantages of hosting the Olympics are seen much more during the Summer Games as opposed to the Winter Games. Nation’s that host during the summer tend to send 223% as many athletes as they would for events they weren’t hosting, and still win proportionally more medals, receiving 268% as many total medals as they normally would. Playing on home soil is most helpful in terms of winning gold, with the home country winning a whopping 309% as many gold medals as they normally would. That number goes down for silver and bronze, but the home country still generally wins proportionally more medals of all colors.
When it comes to the Winter Olympics though, the benefits are far less pronounced. Winter hosts generally send 152% as many athletes as they normally would and still see a boost in terms of winning gold, bringing home nearly 168% of the gold medals they would win at the average Winter Games. After that the numbers are less inspiring. Much like with the summer version of the events, gold medals see the highest spike with silver and bronze medals slipping behind. In total, the host in the winter receives 147% of the total medals they would normally get. While any country would be happy to win 47% more medals than normal, doing so while sending 52% more athletes than normal is a bit of a disappointment.
The host nation does almost always see a bump in the medal table though. Out of 53 total Olympic Games (both summer and winter) held in the modern era, only three times has the country holding the games finished lower on the table than they do in a typical year. Twice that host nation has been Canada. In the Summer Games, Canada has an average rank of 17.63 but they finished 27th at the 1976 Montreal Olympics. In the winter they have an average rank of 7.75 but finished 12th at the 1988 Calgary Games. The other was the UK who have an average table finish in the summer of 9.17, but finished 12th at the 1948 London Olympics.
Another interesting pattern that emerged was that nations that host the same version of the Olympics (either summer or winter) generally perform the best in the first one. There have been 15 instances of the same country hosting multiple of the same Games, and in nine of those instances their best medal table rank came the first time they hosted. Canada, Japan, and Switzerland are the only countries that have improved ranking each time they’ve hosted one set of Games. Japan is also the only country to host multiple Summer Games and Winter Games without seeing a slip in the rankings in any of them. This is bad news for France, who will be hosting their third Summer Games this year. Be sure to keep an eye on our bet365 bonus codes as the events get closer to find the best offers when placing wagers on this year’s Olympics!
Methodology
You can find the full data set here. We collected data from all 23 countries that have hosted the Olympics since the beginning of the modern games in 1896. The number of athletes sent, medals won, and final table rank were recorded for all years that each country sent athletes to the Olympics to compare their performance in their home games against their average performance. Please note that for the sake of our data we combined the number of athletes sent and medals won by East Germany and West Germany from the year’s they sent separate delegations. You can see their split results in the full data set. The data for Russia is also a compilation of performances, including athletes representing the Russian Empire, USSR, Russia, the “Unified Team” as well as the recent banners of the Russian Olympic Committee and Olympic Athletes from Russia.