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Since there is some debate about the best way to measure who won the Olympics (correct answer: “We all did”), I thought I would prepare the results using several different methods so that various countries could claim to be the winners.

Usually, there is some sort of debate as to whether the winner should be the country with the most gold medals or the country with the most total medals. In keeping with Soviet tradition, these Olympics removed the options and give you only one choice: Russia. No debate necessary.

Since there are too much data to put into one post, I’ll summarize the results in this post and also point to another page that contains the unsummarized data.

Summary: The Netherlands won the 2014 Olympic games.

I prefer to normalize the Olympic rankings by athletes or, as they are sometimes called, delegates. How many contestants did a country send to win medals? And how many medals did they win? It’s more of an efficiency rating, but I think it is better than comparing medals to the general population.

Country	Athletes / Point	Rank
Netherlands	0.59	1
Belarus	0.92	2
Slovakia	1.60	3

When one adjusts the points total by number of athletes sent to the Winter Olympics, The Netherlands is the winner. They and Belarus were the only countries to earn more than one point per athlete or, as I ranked them, less than one athlete per point.

For the complete data, please view the charts on the 2014 Olympics Results page.

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