The Olympic medal table - alternative version

The Olympic medal table was not that surprising, bigger richer countries get more medals than smaller countries. The top ten from a few days before the closing ceremony was:

   United States 
   Great Britain  
   China 
   Russia 
   France 
   Germany  
   Japan  
   Italy 
   Australia  
   Netherlands 

I wanted to calculate medal results per capita so I converted the medals won into medal points,  gold = 3 points, silver = 2 and bronze = 1 and calculated the total for each country. I then divided that total by the population of each country to obtain a list of medal points per head of population. This produces a list in which it is almost impossible for large countries to get into the top ten. I think it is a less predictable and so a more interesting list:

   Bahamas  
   New Zealand  
   Jamaica 
   Bahrain  
   Fiji 
   Croatia 
   Armenia 
   Hungary  
   Denmark 
   Georgia

Producing this list required some web scraping to get the medal table and UN estimates of populations see here for an example from my code blog showing how to scrape a table from a web page. The actual calculations were done in Excel - it is easy to look down on Excel but it is quick and easy to use in some limited situations.