Winter Olympics, Historical Perspective

To put Canada's performance at Turino into historical context, here are a couple of charts. The first compares Canada's percentage score with that of Norway, the U.S.A., Germany (adding the West and East scores for the years of two German teams) and Russia (using U.S.S.R. or Unified Team scores for the relevant years). Sweden, Finland, Switzerland and Austria also have a higher historical total than Canada but the graph is cluttered as it is (you'll probably need to click on them to get a good look). After Canada there is a bit of a dropoff to Italy and France.

The second chart is Canada's performance on it's own. I constructed similar charts based on a simple percentage of medals awarded instead of using my own calculation but from this bird's eye view the two sets of charts look very similar so I didn't see a need to post both.

The historical medal winners are available at the official Olympic site here, with a pretty user friendly interface. Of course, if you have questions or are interested in getting a copy of the zip file of the spreadsheets with the historical results leave a comment or send me an email.