Not the usual suspects: other great sporting nations in 2013
One of the beauties of GSN is our unique ability to shine light on the sporting achievements of nations other than the ‘usual suspects’.
By which we mean the top 15 or 20 nations in the Global Cup ranking, the competition that measures the overall sports performance of all nations.
While the Per Capita Cup ranks nations according to how many inhabitants are needed to score 1 GSN points – effectively a measure of how sporty a nation is – other unique GSN indicators pick out interesting achievements across the over 80 sports tracked by GreatestSportingNation.
After six months of sporting activity in 2013 and over 500 different world-class events, we measured which nations have so far been more effective in hitting the spot when it counts, averaging the highest number of points for each placement in the top 8 in any competition tracked by GSN. The Points per Count (PPC, or points per point-scoring placement) six-monthly ranking, taking into account nations with at least a minimum of 3 counts in the year (to clear the field of ‘one-event wonders’) is given below.
Leaders South Africa are only in 23rd position in the overall Global Cup, but have scored high in big sports such as Football (in the African Cup of Nations), Rugby (in the Sevens World Cup), Golf and Women’s Cricket.
New Zealand have done virtually as well, across a wider and incredibly diverse range of sports such as Speedskating, Softball, Snowboarding, Rugby Union (clinching both the Rugby Sevens World Cup and the IRB Sevens Series), Freestyle Skiing, Curling and Cricket! Not surprisingly, they won the Per Capita Cup in 2012, effectively being crowned the sportiest nation on the planet. And they’re a very respectable 14th overall in the Global Cup.
Third-placed in this special ranking is Serbia. Theirs is a more concentrated effort, relying on one man (world Tennis no. 1 Novak Djokovic) and three sports (the others are Water Polo and Basketball) to earn them 37,9 points per count. Many other countries in the ranking are similar to Serbia in being limited to scoring big in 2-3 sports, with the exception of Sweden, the best-placed country (11th) in the Global Cup among the nations in the PPC ranking, which has scored points in 11 different sports.
And where are the big sporting countries in this ranking? They are all out of the top 20, the USA in 25th, Canada in 31st and Russia in 24th.
|
rank |
nation |
PPC |
|
1 |
South Africa |
66,5 |
|
2 |
New Zealand |
65,1 |
|
3 |
Serbia |
37,9 |
|
4 |
Croatia |
31,7 |
|
5 |
Denmark |
28,9 |
|
6 |
Turkey |
25,0 |
|
7 |
Kenya |
23,1 |
|
8 |
Spain |
20,3 |
|
9 |
Kazakhstan |
17,6 |
|
10 |
Ethiopia |
17,5 |
|
11 |
Hungary |
16,8 |
|
12 |
Belarus |
14,9 |
|
13 |
Mexico |
14,3 |
|
14 |
Great Britain |
14,0 |
|
15 |
Sweden |
12,9 |
|
16 |
South Korea |
12,4 |
|
17 |
Slovenia |
12,1 |
|
18 |
Taiwan |
12,0 |
|
19 |
China |
11,8 |
|
20 |
Australia |
11,5 |
