Predicting the Medal Wins by Country at the 2006 Winter Olympic Games: An Econometrics Approach

Demographic and economic characteristics have been shown to provide important predictive power for determining a country’s success in the Olympic Games. This paper extends such research, providing a set of predictions for the gold medals and total medals each country will win at the 2006 Winter Olympics. We expected Germany to win the most medals, followed by the United States, Norway, Italy, Austria, and Canada. For total medals, the overall correlation between the predictions and the actual results was 0.934. While Germany and the United States did finish in the top two places, there were some surprises as Canada, Austria, and Russia performed better than expected, while Norway and Italy did not live up to expectations.