+18 medals but plus or minus what?

This is my last post on the Olympics: promised! My friend Stefano posted this link to an article in (one of the very few) Italian respectable newspapers (more or less the same as this, which is in English).

I took the data resulting from Goldman Sachs' analysis (usual digression and probably cheap moaning: don’t these people have something far more important to do, eg stop draining money, than wasting their time playing around with this?) and plotted this.

That’s the comparison between the observed number of medals won in Beijing and their prediction for the number of medals won in London. Most of the countries seem to lie on the 45 degrees line, which means that they are expected to replicate last time performance. The outstanding countries are effectively Team GB and, only marginally, Italy. The US and China are predicted to do slightly worse than last time around (a difference of just 2 medals).

3. I’m not sure why Italy are predicted to do a bit better that previously $-$ presumably that’s something to do with GDP (one of the variables included in the model)? As I’ve mentioned somewhere else, I think that GDP is only one side of the story as it doesn’t necessarily reflects investment in sports. If you can read Italian, perhaps you can have a look at this $-$ I think I agree almost entirely.