Abstract - Geography of Olympic Combat Sports. Part three: dominance
Background. This article continues a new interdisciplinary line of research into the geography of Olympic combat sports.
Problem and aim. A precise assessment of the point value of medals won at modern Olympic championships was assumed to be relative to the population of the countries concerned. The overarching aim of the article was to construct a new indicator that is a relative measure of medal points related to the population of a country. It also allows comparison of countries that differ in population. The theoretical aim was to construct and validate this indicator, and the practical aim was to apply the indicator to comparisons between different countries, considering the different Olympic combat sports disciplines.
Material and methods. The method of secondary source analysis was used. The results of combat sports competitions at the modern Olympic Games (1896-2021) made available by the International Olympic Committee were used, as well as data on the population number by the United Nations and data from individual country websites. Two indices were constructed to address the problem: the Olympic Games medal winning index (SM); and the Olympic Games points winning index (SP). Descriptive statistics were performed, distributions were examined, and rho Spearman correlations were calculated.
Results. As a result, four perspectives were documented:
1. Countries with a large number of medal points and several dominating combat sports: Hungary, Cuba, Bulgaria, and Sweden;
2. Countries with a large number of medal points and one or two leading combat sports: Georgia and Finland;
3. Countries with a small number of medal points and a small population: Estonia and Armenia;
4. Countries with a small number of medal points and a very small population: San Marino and Tonga.
Conclusions. It was concluded that only the first and second perspective were applicable, as it showed countries relevant in the classification of the number of medal points from previous studies. Therefore, the results of six countries: Hungary (in fencing and modern pentathlon), Cuba (in boxing), Sweden (in modern pentathlon) and Bulgaria (in wrestling, judo and boxing), as well as Georgia (judo and wrestling), and Finland (wrestling and modern pentathlon) are more relevant than those of other countries.