Hosts 'gain Olympian advantage'

Host nation Greece could be awash with medals

Being host to the 2004 Olympics could provide Greece with an advantage when it comes to medal-winning, economic research claims.

By weighing factors such as population size and wealth, PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC) says that it is possible to forecast Olympic performance.

The US will top the table with 70 medals while Great Britain will bag 25 to come ninth, according to PwC.

Thanks to the "home advantage" Greece will win 29 - 16 more than in 2000.

A study suggests Greece is likely to more than double its Olympic medal tally thanks to the economic advantage of hosting the games.

"Our analysis is really intended as just a bit of fun and obviously there is a lot more to Olympic performance than economics or politics," said PwC's UK head of Macroeconomics John Hawksworth.

Mr Hawksworth created the "almost purely economic model" for forecasting performance at the Olympic games.

Factors to watch

The calculations ignore the make-up of a country's team.

So even if a country's team includes sporting heroes like Great Britain's five times gold winner Sir Steve Redgrave, or Australian swimming hero Ian Thorpe, that's not taken into account by PwC's number-crunchers.

The calculations focus on key factors believed to be statistically significant in explaining the medals won by each country at the four Olympics since 1988.

PwC TOP 10 ATHENS PREDICTIONS US - 70 expected, won 97 in 2000 (-27) RUSSIA - 64 expected, 88 in 2000 CHINA - 50 expected, 59 in 2000 (-9) GERMANY - 45 expected, 57 in 2000 (-12) AUSTRALIA - 41 expected, 58 in 2000 (-17) FRANCE - 31 expected, 38 last time (-7) GREECE - 29 expected, 13 in 2000 (+16) TALY - 28 expected, 34 last time (-6) GREAT BRITAIN - 25 expected, 28 last time (-3) SOUTH KOREA - 24 expected, 18 last time (-4)

On the economics front, the higher a country's population or income levels, the better its sporting performance.

Mr Hawksworth also argues that total GDP is "most crucial" to the calculations, rather than how it is distributed among the population.

For example, the US - one of the world's biggest economies, picked up 97 medals in Sydney in 2000.

However, these factors have to be weighed against non-economic ones, such as whether the country was in the former Soviet-bloc and whether it is home country for the games.

Both of these elements can contribute to an improved performance, the research said.

Home advantage

In the case of former Soviet nations, PwC says "this is due to the high importance given to sport in many of these countries".

Ten years after the Iron Curtain crumbled, evidence from Sydney shows the effect is still significant with Russia racking up a medal tally of 88.

It added that a similar effect was still at work in China - which took third place on the 2000 medal board with a total of 59.

Team members do not affect PwC's calculations

The report adds that Greece could reap the benefits of staging the 2004 competition at home, as host nations normally improve their performance by 2%, PwC found.

Fifteen of the top 30 performers at the previous Olympics are expected to see their performance weaken.

For example, Australia will see its haul dip by 17 medals to 41 from last time - when it played host to the competition.

Meanwhile the US, whose economy has been struggling to maintain a recovery in recent months, is expected to take 27 fewer medals home from Athens.

For the Great Britain team to perform in line with PwC's expectations, it will have to pick up a grand total of 25 medals.