Tuesday, December 20, 2011

Beijing 2008: The Cost of Gold

What price for an Olympic Gold? How much would you pay?

I recently came across an interesting article from The Science of Sport website. The article can be found here:

www.sportsscientists.com/2008/08/beijing-olympic-medal-price.html

It turns out that each bronze medal will set you back a cool Aus $15 million, while gold and silver will cost you about Aus $40 million!

The point is there is a relationship between money invested and medals won. If you want 20 gold medals, then spend Aus $800 million every four years. The graph above was used to project how many medals Australia would win in Sydney - the dashed line in the graph.