Success and Failure of Countries at the Olympic Games by Danyel Reiche (review)

If during the Olympics it seems as though the same nations appear on the medal podium over and over, your eyes are not deceiving you. Throughout the first 120 years of the modern Olympic movement, a relatively small number of countries have dominated the medal count. Danyel Reiche sets out to explain why this is the case, exploring the factors that differentiate the perpetual winners from everyone else. At the same time, he investigates how different countries define Olympic success and why it has become a critical measure of international worth. According to Reiche, winning medals, particularly gold, is a widely accepted means of gaining legitimacy and demonstrating soft power, a concept that dates back to the Cold War when the Soviet Union and the United States used the Olympic medal count as a means of demonstrating supremacy.

Reiche is thorough in his methods, using a wide range of sources to support his arguments for the prevalence of certain traits among the dominant nations. His explanation of the various means used to measure Olympic success and detailed case studies of individual countries' efforts validate his thesis. The discussion of which sports particular countries choose to pursue and the level of state support granted to those deemed the best medal hopes draws on a lot of painstaking research. His differentiation between the summer and the winter games is thoughtful and well argued, as is his explanation of how Olympic success is often attributable to a combination of "macro variables" and policy factors (3). His contention that not all sports are weighted equally at either a national or international level is proven by the example of how the men's soccer gold has become the ultimate prize to Brazilians but does not mean nearly as much to Canada.

After a detailed introduction describing his methods and the growing diplomatic significance of the games, Reiche organizes his work into chapters where each analyzes a specific factor and how it contributes to Olympic success or a lack thereof. In the end, it is no single element that leads a country to soar or fail but a confluence that varies from state to state. He has included a formula of four factors on the policy level that aptly explains why the United States continues to dominate while countries like Sweden have seen their summer medal haul tail off in recent years.

Overall this work is very well written. Reiche supports his points with ample evidence drawn from a wide array of sources, including International Olympic Committee and New York Times statistics and countless current studies of the games. The one place where he perhaps does not prove his argument is in his contention that the host-country advantage truly does not matter in terms of offering a bump in the medal count. This is a minor point in an otherwise thoughtful work that provides a welcome contribution to the growing field of Olympic studies looking at state involvement.