ATRIOTIC Americans can relax and Secretary of State Madeleine K. Albright, who has so cleverly endeared the United States to the rest of humanity by proclaiming America the world's one "essential nation," should be proud.
Why? Because at the 2000 Summer Olympic Games in Sydney, Australia, the United States will win 97 of the 888 medals awarded, more than any other nation, once again demonstrating America's physical and moral superiority over the rest of the world.
Sweaty nationalists in Germany, Russia, China and Australia will also have ample reason to cheer; each of those countries' athletes will win from 49 to 63 medals.
On the other hand, there will be much weeping, gnashing of teeth and public soul-searching in Japan and the United Kingdom, which will win fewer than 20 medals each.
Since the quadrennial jockfest doesn't begin for another five days, one might reasonably ask how anyone could read the future in this way.
The answer is simple: Two professors figured it out. In a study released on Aug. 28, Andrew Bernard, of the Tuck School of Business at Dartmouth College, and Meghan R. Busse, of the Yale School of Management, examined Summer Olympics medal counts for the last 40 years to see what factors determine how many medals each nation wins.
"I was so annoyed when people said we did well or didn't do well — I didn't have anything to compare it to," Mr. Bernard said, explaining the statisticians' zeal to reduce romance to numbers that lies behind this esoteric research project.
But now he does, and so do the rest of us.
Like so many paradigm-shifting breakthroughs, the formula discovered by Mr. Bernard and Ms. Busse is beautiful in its simplicity.
Just two factors account for 95 percent of a nation's predicted medal count: the number of medals it won at a previous Olympics, and the overall size of its economy. (Bigger is better.)
Per-capita income is irrelevant, Mr. Bernard said. A large, poor country will win as many medals as a small, wealthy country, assuming they have the same overall national income.
The income-to-medal ratio is not linear, Mr. Bernard said. Because of limits on the number of athletes they can send to the Olympics, the largest, richest nations win a smaller share of medals than their share of the world economy.
For example, the United States would have a good chance of sweeping the gold, silver, and bronze medals in women's and men's basketball if it were allowed to send three teams instead of one.
In addition, increased training opportunities for athletes from poor nations have narrowed the gap between rich and poor over the last generation.
African runners regularly work out in the United States and Europe, and the International Olympic Committee sends some of the cash from the Games to Olympic committees in poor nations, which use the money to finance their own programs.
Of still greater importance than the size of a country's gross national product is its long-term record at the Games, Mr. Bernard said.
Japan, for example, has the world's second-largest economy, but in 1996 it won just 14 medals, fewer than Hungary, the Netherlands and Brazil.
This year, Mr. Bernard expects Japan to win 19 medals, far fewer than it should take home given its size. On the other hand, Australia consistently outperforms.
"If you have done well in the past, that's going to persist," Mr. Bernard said. "Once you develop infrastructure and training and facilities, and once you develop athletes, they do last for a couple of Olympics," he said.
That must be reassuring, especially for the athletes.
The professors' model has generally been successful when backtested against previous Olympic results. Used retrospectively on the 1996 Games, the formula showed that the United States should have won 101 medals, hitting America's total exactly.
It overestimated Germany's medal count, coming up with 77 medals for Germany, which actually won 65, , but was dead on with China's count of 50 medals and nearly nailed Russia's 63-medal haul.
Still, do not expect the model to put to rest the only Olympic sport in which every nation excels.
That would be the post-Games handwringing over medal counts. Even the Australians, who won 41 medals in Atlanta, were upset that they had won only three golds.
"You have to find something to complain about," Mr. Bernard said.
So, now that the results are known: Let the Games begin!
