NZ tops per capita medal count

More than halfway through the London Olympics, New Zealand sits atop the much-hyped, at least locally, medal per head of population table.

Boosted by a swag of rowing gongs, and now with seven medals, New Zealand heads off Slovenia, Denmark, Australia and Jamaica in the top five and we now boast one medal per 277,000 people.

And according to the www.medalspercapita.com website, set up by New Zealander Craig Nevill-Manning, who is an engineering director for Google in New York, with three gold medals, we are also top of the gold medals per capita table.

Australia is fourth and 27th respectively.

New Zealand also leads the weighted medals table, which is calculated on values assigned to each colour of medal.

However, we are only 10th in gross domestic product per medal, where we have one medal for each $US18.7 billion of GDP. To top that table we would have to somehow overtake, if we wanted to, Ethiopia, North Korea, Mongolia and Moldova.

Mr Nevill-Manning's website calculates the medals per capita right back to the first modern Games in 1896.

He said he set it up so people could quickly answer the question of who leads the world in medals per capita and other categories.

"My bias? I'm originally from New Zealand, which has consistently been in the top half-dozen or so countries for total medals and gold medals per capita."

Sports psychologist Karen Nimmo saw no problem with New Zealanders turning to statistics to evaluate Olympic performance.

New Zealand always did rather well in such comparisons and she did not see it as the country trying to justify itself, she told NZ Newswire.

"It's good. If anything that makes the country feel good, why not? If you can make the stats work for you, well and good."