New Zealand Medals Per Capita

Our silver fern has once again been turned gold in the last few hours with Sailing athlete Tom Ashley winning the third gold for New Zealand at the Olympics.

This brings New Zealand’s Olympic Medals tally to 9 medals so far, with still 4 competition days to go! This is the best effort since Barcelona 1992 when we took home 10 medals total. The three Olympic Games between Barcelona and Beijing produced just an average of five medals per Games – so with a few medal hopes still to come we are likely to make 2008 our best games ever – topping the historical top tally of Seoul 1988 with 13 medals.

Per capita, New Zealand Olympic athletes now rank fourth in the world for medal wins, with just Bahrain (pop 760,000, 1 medal), Estonia (pop 1.34 million, 2 medals) and Jamaica (pop 2.71 million, 5 medals) ahead of New Zealand’s population of just over 4 million. Before the Olympic Games 2008, New Zealand ranked 6th in the world per capita for medal wins.

Image from Flickr.