Performance in Asian Games versus Olympics - A comparison

From the pinnacle of Asian Games, Olympics was a steep fall for India. That set me thinking as to how many more countries found the going tough on the world stage after excelling at the Asian games. For my initial analysis, I took the top 15 countries at Asian Games and mapped out their corresponding ranking at Olympics.

As expected, India's Olympic ranking of 71 was third worst behind Malaysia and Qatar. But rankings are not always a great measure to assess how well a country did at a multisport event where a country with a single gold medal outranks another with multiple medals on the account of that country not winning a gold medal. So, in order to have an equitable comparison, I mapped out the number of medals each country won at the Olympics and Asian Games side by side.  

This time India narrowly avoided the lower third of the graph which contained countries such as Hong Kong, Indonesia and Bahrain that were placed higher over India in the Olympic rankings. Like rankings, number of medals doesn't give us a correlation between performances at the continental and world levels. 

To achieve this I ordered the countries based on the ratio of 

(Total no. of medals won at the Asian Games)/(Total no. of medals won at Olympics) 

This ratio will allow us to discern how consistently countries are able to carry over their performance from the continental to world level.

• Surprisingly Kyrgyzstan did better than everybody else on this chart. Although they were placed 18th at the Asian Games with 15 medals they were more successful than everyone else at replicating this performance on the world (Olympics) stage with 6 medals
• One point to note is that they had only a 15 member contingent comprising of 10 wrestlers at the Olympics. Five out of their 10 wrestlers won medals including Aisuluu Tynybekova which underlines the point that focusing on select disciplines could actually work out better in global events. 
• Another unexpected member of the top 5 was Philippines which concentrated on boxing and gymnastics to acquire four medals from a 22 member contingent
• Iran is another interesting member of the top 5. Iran won almost half of the medals (54) that India did at Asian Games but won double the medals (12) that India did at Olympics. Eight of their 12 member strong wrestling contingent won medals while all of their taekwondo team athletes (4) ended up on the podium. Their focus on combat sports (especially their dominance in wrestling) paid rich dividends allowing them to soar to 21st rank on the Olympic rankings

India's stupendous performance at Asian Games followed by a sub-par outing at Olympics resulted in pushing them to the bottom of this chart. Shooting and athletics accounted for almost half of India's medals at Asian Games with archery, wrestling, rowing, squash and badminton providing reliable support. With compound archery, squash, cricket and kabaddi not being included in Olympics, India had to rely on other events to make up the bulk of the numbers but that did not happen. The one takeaway that is emerging from these numbers is that while we are emerging as a continental great there's still work needs to be done if we have to consistently ace the global stage. Let's hope that happens soon enough for all of us.

Until next time,

Your number cruncher.