Norway wins 2022 Per Capita Cup
Norway won the Per Capita Cup 2022, gaining the title of world’s sportiest nation for the seventh time since GSN records began in 2008.
In the Per Capita Cup, a country’s population is divided by the number of GSN points scored, yielding a figure for the number of inhabitants a country needs in order to score one GSN point. The lower the number, the sportier the country (which must have a minimum of 10 top-eight placements in the year to qualify).
It’s Norway’s fourth win in the last five editions of the Per Capita Cup, a streak interrupted only by Slovenia in 2021. For much of the year, Slovenia looked set to finish second, but Croatia climbed 13 positions in the ranking in December, after coming third in the FIFA Football World Cup, and pipped Slovenia to the runner-up spot.
Norway triumphed with a comfortable margin over Croatia (it needed 3,635 inhabitants to score a GSN point, as opposed to Croatia’s 5,326), primarily thanks to its Snow & Ice sports prowess. It won the Beijing Winter Olympics and the 2022 Snow & Ice sports group, in both cases ahead of the USA and Canada.
Of Norway’s 1,452 points scored in 2022, 76.1% came from Snow & Ice sports, with outright victories in Biathlon, Cross-country Skiing and Nordic Combined.
Among the other sports in which Norway scored points this year, notable were Tennis (its fourth-best sport points-wise), Athletics, Orienteering, Shooting, Road Cycling, Beach Volleyball (a surprise here!) and Golf. You can see the full list here.
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Greatest Sporting Nation is a ranking of countries based on their performance in top-level international tournaments in sports in which there is genuine global competition. Countries (national teams and/or individual athletes) score Qualifying Points by finishing in the top eight places in Qualifying Events.
These Qualifying Points are then weighted to produce GSN Points, based on a formula that takes into account individual vs team sports, the sport’s participation (number of countries) and the frequency (annual/biennial/quadrennial) of the tournaments.
The Country scoring the most Points in a calendar year wins the Global Cup for that year. The country that scores the most points relative to its population wins the Per Capita Cup. For a more detailed explanation, please refer to the ‘How It Works’ section on the site.
