Olympic Predictions for Paris, 2024
By Dr Steve Jasper
Olympic predictions for Paris, 2024
Back in 2021 I published my Tokyo Olympic gold medal predictions (see below), and I think I did fairly well overall. Predicting Olympic gold medals is not an exact science, and there can be outliers – I can’t predict someone like Steven Bradbury. However, I have shown that gold medal counts decrease when athletes cross multiple time zones, and silver medal counts increase (for more information click here). So here are my predictions for the Paris Olympic Games in 2024:
Biggest winners:
- France: expect the home team to do extremely well, in the range of 15 – 20 gold medals
- Great Britain: will also do well, no jet lag to deal with. 25 – 30 gold medals.
- USA: will do better than Tokyo, 45 – 50 gold medals. Expect even more gold medals at the next Olympics in Los Angeles.
Biggest losers:
- Japan: after hosting, they now have to deal with jet lag. Somewhere from 7-10 gold medals
- Australia: jet lag is also an issue for Australia. Again, somewhere from 7-10 gold medals
Review of previous predictions: Tokyo, 2021
I published my Olympic gold medal predictions before the Tokyo Olympics in 2021. Just as now, I went public with my predictions. Here are my predictions, with the actual results:
| Country | Prediction | Actual | Error |
|---|---|---|---|
| Australia | 15 ± 2 | 17 | +2 |
| China | 40 ± 4 | 38 | -2 |
| France | 7 ± 1 | 10 | +3 |
| Germany | 14 ± 2 | 10 | -4 |
| Great Britain | 18 ± 2 | 22 | +4 |
| Italy | 7 ± 1 | 10 | +3 |
| Japan | 15 ± 2 | 27 | +12 |
| Russia (as ROC) | 25 ± 3 | 20 | -5 |
| South Korea | 14 ± 2 | 6 | -8 |
| USA | 38 ± 4 | 39 | +1 |
Mostly pretty good. The only real surprises were just how well Japan performed as the host nation, and how poorly South Korea performed. It’s easier to predict for larger nations than smaller ones, and I got the USA within one medal and China within two. I’m giving myself an A- for this assessment.