Chinanews.com, Beijing, February 3 (Reporter Sun Zifa) Regarding the bidding and hosting of the Olympic Games, there is a popular saying that the host country can win more Olympic medals.
Is this view scientific?
Believable and reliable?
Scientific Reports, an open-access academic journal under Springer Nature, published a sports research paper in the early hours of February 3, Beijing time, stating that there is insufficient evidence that Olympic hosts can win more medals.
The new study finds that when socioeconomic factors are controlled for, countries hosting the Olympics do not win more medals.
The findings disprove the existence of the so-called "host effect", whereby the host country wins more medals than usual.
However, the researchers also reminded that larger-scale research is still needed in the follow-up, and more Olympic Games will be counted to confirm their research results.
According to the paper, countries that bid to host the Olympic Games usually use hosting the Olympic Games to increase the number of medals as a reason to persuade the public to apply.
Previous research has found that the host country gains an additional 1.8 percentage points in medals at the Summer Olympics, though the boost is not evenly distributed across sports.
Corresponding author and first author of the paper, Gergely Csurilla (Gergely Csurilla), Institute of Economics, Hungarian Center for Economic and Regional Research, and colleague Imre Fert (Imre Fert?) collaborated to compare the 1996 The difference in the number of medals between the host country of the 2021 Summer Olympics in the year it hosts the games and when it is not the host country is studied to determine the extent to which hosting the Olympic Games can increase the number of medals.
The host countries for these Olympic Games were the United States, Australia, Greece, China, Great Britain, Brazil and Japan.
In addition to Olympic medal totals, they also analyzed the medal counts of male and female athletes.
The authors point out that if adjusted for socioeconomic factors such as GDP per capita and population size, the Olympic "host effect" disappears for most countries.
Only Australia (2000) and Great Britain (2012) have maintained substantial increases in their medal totals.
The number of medals won by male athletes in the UK and Brazil (2016) increased significantly, and Australian female athletes also won more medals than expected.
Therefore, the authors argue, Olympic bidders should be cautious about expecting more medals than usual.
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