Winter Olympics: The Fastest Countries Revealed

Winter Olympics: The Fastest Countries Revealed

Highlights From Research

• Norway is the fastest country at the Winter Olympics with a total ranked speed score of 16.98 across their gold medal victories
  
  
• Germany (14.79), the United States (13.65) and the Netherlands (13.44) are also among the fastest countries
  
  
• Canada comes in 10th with a ranked speed score of 7.34.

With the Beijing Winter Olympics commencing this Friday (04/02/2022), the world will be watching the
greatest athletes take to the snow.

Interested in sporting outcomes, experts at RantCasino.com were eager to find out which countries are the fastest at winter sports. Through analysing data from Olympic.com’s gold medalist results for 95 Winter Olympic events between 1924-2018, a ranked speed score for each country was established, revealing the fastest country of all time at the Winter Olympic Games!

Results on seven Winter Olympic sports were considered in this study. These included Cross-Country Skiing, Alpine Skiing, Bobsleigh, Luge, Skeleton, Speed Skating and Short-Track Speed Skating.

The Results

RantCasino.com can reveal that Norway is the fastest country at the Winter Olympic Games with a total ranked speed score of 16.98 - 261% higher than the average of 4.71. Norway ranks fastest for Cross-Country Skiing, for which they have won 47 gold medals, accounting for 36% of their 132 gold medals at the Winter Olympics between 1924 - 2018.

Ranking second is Germany with a total ranked speed score of 14.79. Team Germany stands as the fastest country for Bobsleigh and Luge events, winning 13 gold medals and 18 gold medals respectively. In total, this country has won 93 gold medals at the Winter Olympics.

In third place is the United States with a total ranked speed score of 13.65, standing as the team fastest in Skeleton events. Their fastest performance in this event was at the 2002 Salt Lake City Winter Olympics where Jim Shea jr. and Tristan Gale both took home gold with a respective time of 1 minute 42 seconds and 1 minute 45 seconds. Also among the fastest countries at the Winter Olympic Games are the Netherlands (13.44), Sweden (9.60) and Austria (8.77), respectively ranking fourth, fifth and sixth. Notably the Netherlands is fastest at Speed Skating, Austria is fastest at Alpine Skiing and South Korea (7.45), which ranks ninth, is fastest at Short-Track Speed Skating.

Methodology

1. RantCasino.com conducted a study to determine the fastest countries at the Winter Olympic Games.
   
   
2. A seed list of 95 Winter Olympic events between 1924-2018 across 15 Winter Olympics sports was created by scraping Olympics.com. Events included in the 2014 Sochi Winter Olympics were used as a standard due to Olympic sporting events being subject to change each year.
   
   
3. For each of the 95 events analysed, the gold medalist winner’s name, country, and result were also scraped from Olympics.com. Participant names and results not available on Olympics.com were manually collated from Wikipedia and Olympian Database. Gold medalists for each sport were subsequently ranked in accordance with their overall result.
   
   
4. Of the 15 Winter Olympic sports initially analysed the following 8 were removed from the study either due to a lack of data or being based on an overall score not a speed: Biathlon, Curling, Figure Skating, Freestyle Skating, Ice Hockey, Nordic Combined, Ski Jumping, Snowboarding.
   
   
5. For each individual event, a reciprocal score (1/n, where n is the nth position in the ranking) was added to each gold medalist based on their ranking. The fastest received a score of 1, the second fastest received a score of 1/2, third was 1/3 etc.
   
   
   1. Following this, the scores for each event were combined to give a score for each country in the respective sport. The scores for each sport were then summed to give an overall score for each country, by which they were subsequently ranked.
      
      
6. Data collected on 13/01/2022.

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