While most of the country will anxiously monitor Olympic results to see how many medals the U.S. team will win in Athens this summer, Tuck professor Andrew Bernard claims he already knows how many medals the team will take home.
The Opening Ceremonies may not begin until Friday, but international economics professor Bernard and his colleague Meghan Busse, a professor at the Haas School of Business at U.C. Berkeley, have already predicted that the United States will win 93 overall medals and 37 golds, besting their predictions for any other country.
While Bernard and Busse's predictions may seem arbitrary, their mathematical formula has proven its accuracy. Their calculations exactly foretold the overall and gold medal count -- 97 and 39 -- for the U.S. team in the 2000 Olympics in Sydney with a 96 percent accuracy rate of predictions across 35 countries.
Bernard is confident that his technique will yield similar results this year.
"I think on average we'll be 96 percent accurate again," Bernard said. "I think if we get the U.S. exactly correct no one will care if we're not exactly correct overall."
Bernard and Busse determined that four economic variables, which include population, per capita income and previous Olympic record, account for the fate of a country's Olympic success.
Countries with larger populations and per capita income, such as the United States, are able to take home more medals every four years, according to their formula. However, a country's Olympic victories do not always conform to these figures.
Nations such as Canada, Japan and India underperform based on their economic statistics, while Australia, the Netherlands and Cuba tend to over-perform. As a result, Bernard and Busse stress the importance of a country's previous performance as a more accurate predictor of future success.
Along with these factors, Bernard and Busse also had to take into consideration the home field advantage that the host country experiences. For example, Australia was able to win 58 medals in the 2000 Games in Sydney, 17 more than their total in the 1996 Atlanta games. Consequently, the professors predicted Greece will increase its medal count from 13 in 2000 to 27 this year.
According to Bernard, only these economic factors translate into accurate predictions, whereas individual sports and competitors do not factor into the formula.
"Ignorance is bliss for us," Bernard said. "If a country doesn't win a medal in the 100-meter race, it will win a medal in archery or some other sport. For us it won't matter."
Behind the United States, Bernard and Busse have calculated that Russia will take home the second greatest number of medals with 83, followed by China with 57 and Germany with 55.
"If we're using the right formula, we expect 10 countries to be within one medal of the total," Bernard said.
Even though Bernard and Busse have been able to achieve great success in calculating medal counts for the Summer Olympic Games, Bernard admitted that this formula does not apply to the Winter Games.
Since the Winter Games do not include as many sports or countries as the Summer Games, the number of medals won cannot average out in the same fashion. Furthermore, Bernard said that snow or ice surfaces add a degree of uncertainty to the Winter Games.
The accurate Summer estimations have created a stir in current national news circles, as Bernard's predictions have been published in the Wall Street Journal and broadcast on NPR. Others have also attempted to predict medal counts. Sports Illustrated has estimated that the U.S. will win 111 medals while USA Today predicts an even greater success rate with 119.
