Welcome to the Greatest Sporting Nation

I'm Dan Thompson and I'm passionate about sports. Playing them, watching them, talking about them - and endlessly perusing tables, results and rankings. I've long thought about a system that would answer the question : which country is the best at sport?

Inspired by the 2008 Olympics, and the global obsession with the medals table, I put some initial thoughts down on an email in the autumn of 2008.

Less than a year later we're proud to launch TheGreatestSportingNation.com which answers that question - and so much more.

GSN will tell you which country is the best at sport in absolute terms and per capita. We can tell you which country has performed best over the past month, the year to date and since our records began. We can also tell you which country is the best by any individual sport or by any sport grouping (such as winter sports), by gender, over the history of a particular tournament - or by any combination of these factors.

What started out as a simple idea has become an extraordinary system capable of analysing performances over 80 sports and 150 tournaments (and counting!) During the development of this sytem we have developed a series of processes and technologies and we now offer bespoke professional services analysing sports data and providing web services to sporting bodies of every size.

Although we've spent countless hours developing our systems we have no doubt that they can be improved. Please Get Involved and tell us what you think of the site and How It Works. Even better, why not become a Sport or Country Editor and contribute to GSN - and earn some money at the same time.

I'd like to thank my colleagues Nic Mira and Hans Stocker. Not only for their skill and enthusiasm without which GSN wouldn't exist. But also for the enormously high standards they've set in everything we've done at GSN.

Standards which have allowed us to create the first truly objective global ranking of countries by sporting performance. Now we really do know how good every country is at sports!

Many other people have helped create GSN - thank you to every one of them.

Finally a special word of thanks to my father, David Thompson, from whom I inherited my love of sports (although unfortunately not his skill at sports..) and who has helped us enormously with this project.