Forecaster: Century medals mark unlikely

ATHENS, Greece — Don't bet the rent on those forecasts of a triple-digit U.S. medal haul in the Summer Games. An Ivy League number-cruncher, it turns out, may be the Olympics' true wizard of odds.

And he's got a different view of how it will turn out.

After analyzing statistics, history and the fuzzy yet unmistakable effects of the host country advantage, Andrew Bernard, a professor of international economics at Dartmouth, predicts Americans will win 93 medals, including 37 golds.

He's been right before. In 2000, Bernard and research partner Meghan Busse had forecast the United States would win 97 medals, including 39 golds — exactly what American athletes ended up with in Sydney.

"It's just a little bit of common sense and some statistics," Bernard said Monday in a telephone interview from his office in Hanover, N.H. "We'll have to wait and see if we have another gold medal performance or if we'll be knocked out of contention."

His prediction for the U.S. team, which he forecasts will outperform Russia, China, Germany and Australia, falls short of the U.S. Olympic Committee's glittery goal of 100. Media guesses have gone even higher; Sports Illustrated magazine, for instance, projected that Americans will win 111 medals.

But conventional forecasts are based on assessments of individual athletes like swimmer Michael Phelps or sprinter Maurice Green. Bernard and Busse, who teaches economics at the University of California-Berkeley, focused instead on wealth, population and other indicators to project medal totals for 34 countries.

Over the last four decades, four key factors — population, per-capita income, past performance and the host country effect — have driven national Olympic medal hauls, they wrote in a recent study published in the Review of Economics and Statistics.

A combination of big population and high per-capita income is potent, explaining why the United States and Germany win a lot of medals, Bernard said.

Size matters, he said, "because it gives a country more chances to have an athlete with the extraordinary natural ability that's necessary to become an Olympic champion." Income matters because wealthier nations have the resources to develop medal contenders.

So why does China always win more medals than France? Because its huge population more than offsets its low per-capita income, the researchers say.