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Anonymous
>>265350 Wrong, actually.
If you look at women's individual saber, you will see that Americans got 3 fencers in, the French got 3, and the Italians only had one fencer. The Americans won all 3 medals. For many sports, you have to reach a certain level of skill before you can qualify to enter the Olympics. A larger total population means a larger chance that you will have people good at those sports.
On top of that, with a diverse population of over 1 billion people, all with differing interests, you are likely to find good sportsmen in just about every sport you look at.
Lets say, you had a country with a population of 1,000,000. 90% of them live fairly average lives. About 10% are privileged enough to spend enough time practicing a sport to get good at it. That is 100,000 people. Now, lets say that only 5% of them are truly talented, so you get 5,000. Of those talented people, maybe 10% have the privilege of the best coaches/teachers. That is 500. Furthermore, most of the best athletes started training from a very young age. Of these 500 people, only 250 people have the money and dedication to do that. 10% of them are Olympic quality athletes. You have 25 people left. 50% of them will be bronze level athletes at best (12.5), 25% will be silver level at best (6.25), and 10% will be gold level at best (2.5). 0.1% have the ability to compete with Michael Phelps (0.025). Smaller countries are therefore put at a disadvantage when it comes to selecting Olympiads, since they have a smaller pool of athletes to choose from. (Disclaimer: statistics were made up, but if you can figure out the real percentages, you can have a good estimate of how well a country should do, not accounting the "historical pastime" bonus that countries like Italy and France get for fencing.)
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