One Year out from the Beijing Olmpics: Medals and Doping

Today we are exactly one year out from the start of the 2008 Olympics in Beijing. Besides being general fans of the Olympics we have several employees training to hopefully participate in Beijing in the rowing events. They made a good showing a few weeks back at the Pan Am games bringing back medals – including frequent blog contributor Jen Reck with a bronze in the women’s pair.

With the large company interest in the Olympic games we thought we’d bring in some Olympic data to map as well as a perspective on recent controversy surrounding the games. Everyone is familiar with the recent medal power houses – USA, China, Russia – but which countries get the most medals for their population size. Bang for the buck, pound for pound, these countries standout for 1996-2004 games:

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The Bahamas dominate with 5.04 medals per million people, followed by Cuba with 2.4, then sports loving Australia at 2.35 and Jamaica with 2.35.

The dark side of Olympic glory are the growing scandals surrounding drug doping for performance enhancement. There have many stories about the increase in drug testing for the Beijing Olympics. The United States Anti Doping Agency has said all Olympic candidates must be in the drug testing pool for the next year in order to participate. With all the attention on doping for the next Olympics many have focused on China’s history of doping transgressions and whether systematic doping has been eradicated from China for the 2008 games. To gain a perspective on the controversy I thought it would be interesting to map out which countries have the most doping transgressions. To do so we took the data from the Wikipedia page of sports people sanctioned for doping offenses. Bill geo-coded the data and did counts for each country. The results mapped out as such:

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The map clearly shows that the USA dominates in athletes sanctioned for drug doping with 115 followed by Russia with 44, Italy with 24, and Germany with 22. China is well down the ladder with 12. So, is this a case of the pot calling the kettle black in the case of the US media pointing out Chinese transgression. The direct answer is yes – we have plenty of our own doping problems to worry about. There is though more to the story. The list points out athletes that were sanctioned not athletes that tested positive. According to a CBC article over 40 Chinese swimmers alone have tested positive for doping since 1990. There could likely be a difference between athletes that are reported as sanctioned to the public and athletes that test positive from a country. Since the Wikipedia data is based on public reporting of sanctioned athletes it could be skewed towards countries that openly reveal transgressions.

No matter how you slice it there is a doping problem across the globe and it has the potential to mar the Olympic games as it has the Tour de France. I’ll close with the question of how do we combat it. The recent announcements on increased drug testing illustrates the primary tactic of testing more people – increasing the pool of athletes. I spent 4 years myself in the USADA testing pool and I would argue that spending your resources on testing more people is not going to solve the problem. Simply because the doping occurs primarily with the top athletes not the bottom of the pile. Doping requires resources and money to fund it and mask it. The second and third tier of athletes rarely have the resource to successfully pull off doping so why spend your resources monitoring them. What always burned me when I had to deal with the hassles of testing – submitting your scheduled location for every day of the week and faxing updates whenever you deviate from that schedule for more than 48 hours – was that I was paying the price for the high end athletes that were cheating. The same athletes that had the money and resources to cheat system. I’d love to see more resources going after the top end of the sport, because lets face it if you are doping and coming in last place – who cares you have already received your punishment.