The All Blacks and their kin: the world’s most dominant sporting nations

Peerless. New Zealand’s All Blacks have beaten their own record of consecutive Rugby Union test match victories after beating Australia in the Bledisloe Cup today,

having already triumphed in the 2016 Rugby Championship. Their combination of power and finesse is unstoppable, and none of the other Southern Hemisphere nations could come close to them, in any area of the game.

 

The All Blacks' amazing superiority has prompted us to seek kindred performances by other sporting nations great and small – not forgetting that New Zealand has a population of only 4,276,100.

Are there other sports under the sun which are being utterly dominated by a single nation? We cast our eyes back to GSN infancy (2008), and came up with some amazing success stories.

 

We start with the world’s most populous nation, China, and their complete dominance of Table Tennis. Since 2008 there have been four editions of the World Team Championships, four of the World Individual Championships and three editions of the summer Olympics, and China have won all of these tournaments for both men and women, in singles, doubles and mixed doubles… except on two occasions only, which are so momentous they must be recorded: the 2015 and 2013 Mixed Doubles World Championship, won respectively by Japan and North Korea.

In the Table Tennis Global Cup 2016, after the Olympics and the World Team Championships, the ranking shows clear evidence that China will not relinquish their top spot this year.

 

China’s offshore neighbours, Japan, are no strangers to dominance either. They have topped the GSN ranking in all editions of the Judo Olympics and the Judo World Championships, for men and women, since records began and, as the Rio Judo Olympics’ top 20 table shows below, in a most emphatic manner.

 

The USA and sporting supremacy are synonymous at GSN, the Stars & Stripes having won all editions of the Global Cup to date, for both men and women. One sport in which their leadership is uncontested is Basketball: the USA won both the men’s and women’s titles at the 2010 and 2014 World Championships, and did likewise with their Dream Teams in Beijing, London and Rio (to remain within GSN chronology), though Serbia gave them  a good run for their dollars as the final Rio table below shows.

 

Having mentioned China and the USA, could we leave the other world sporting behemoth out? Russia’s dominance in many sports may not have always been the result of legitimate practices, but was rarely less comprehensive than in that typically Arctic sport, Bandy. Russia is on a four year-streak, having won the Bandy World Championships since 2013 (see the 2016 table below), and have won the title in six out of nine editions recorded by GSN. Only Sweden managed to beat them, in 2009, 2010 and 2012, and in all these three years Russia finished… second. 

 

But sporting supremacy isn’t merely the preserve of the world’s mightiest nations, as New Zealand prove in Rugby Union. Trawling through our data, we’ve unearthed another tale of unmitigated triumph: the sport is Orienteering, and the country is Switzerland, which won all editions of the Orienteering Global Cup since GSN records began in 2008, except for 2010 (won by Norway) and 2011 (by Sweden). The 2016 edition was a close-fought affair, but Switzerland took its seventh title in nine years, leaving bigger sporting nations like Russia and Canada well behind.