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Where are the Paralympics Medals?
00:09:36
Why did the USA top the gold medals league in the Olympics, but not the Paralympics?...
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- [00:01]
A
Thank you for downloading from the BBC. For details of our complete range of podcasts and our terms of use, go to bbcworldservice.com podcasts
- [00:13]
B
hello and welcome to More or Less on the BBC World Service. This week. We pass our slide rule over the opening bars of some great music. But first, where are all the USA's Paralympic gold medals? The United States topped the Olympics medal table with 46 gold medals this year, but you have to go to 1 2, 3, 4, 5 6th place to find them in the Paralympic medal table. Having won 24 gold medals with only a couple of days to go, it's quite a puzzle because the US has two of the big vital ingredients for success, according to Simon Shibley, a professor of sports management at Sheffield Hallam University
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C
in the for the Olympic Games, population and GDP probably explain about 53% of a nation's success, but for the Paralympics, I think it's probably closer to 60 plus percent.
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B
The US's large population means it should have a big pool of talent to fish from, and it's wealthy, so it's got good health care and it can afford to spend money on sports training and facilities. And another odd thing is that if you look at the historical figures, the US is actually top of the all time Paralympic Gold Medal League T. Now we've discovered this is partly because the US dominated in the 80s when there were twice as many medals to win. In the 1984 Paralympics, there were 345 gold medals for swimming and 447 gold medals for athletics. But in the last few Games, the United States Paralympic ranking has slipped behind its Olympic ranking. So what's changed? Will the attitude of other countries for
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C
one, according to Simon Shibley, more nations are taking part. The number of events remains essentially the same, and in classic economics, if supply remains the same and demand increases, the price of those medals will increase. It makes it difficult for the previously dominant nations to maintain their share of the medals.
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B
China is top of the medals table with 72 golds at the moment, a cool 40 gold medals clear of second place. Great Britain. China's Paralympic story is the opposite of America's. It first entered in 1984 and came 28th four years later. The Paralympics was first held at the same venue as the Olympics, and China's performance strengthened from then on. By the year 2000 it was 6th. Then in 2001 it was announced that Beijing had got the 2008 Games. Three years later, China topped the medals table and it's stayed there ever since. After the 2008 Beijing Games, where China also came top of the Olympics. Simon Shibley analysed the proportion of available medals it got in both Games and found something interesting.
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C
China does even better, I think, in the Paralympic Games than the Olympic Games. What you've got is the world's largest population, probably the fastest growing GDP for a developing nation, and you've also got a government which is very determined to show the new China to the globe.
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B
According to US sports journalist Jim Ferstel, the United States has had a very different attitude to the Paralympics.
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D
It isn't a priority. They don't get the funding, they don't get the attention and they aren't sold the same way as the Olympics are. They have training centers and training programs all over the country for able bodied athletes, but they don't have those for Paralympians that pop up now and then. But it's seen as these people are being helped out with their disability. They're not being trained to be athletes.
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B
The U.S. paralympic Committee has told the BBC that it is very aware of the need to focus on Paralympic grassroots development and it says a Paralympic sports program has been set up to address this. And it's not just China, there are other countries which are doing better in the Paralympics than in the Olympics. Take Nigeria. No medals in the Olympics this time, 12 medals, six of them gold in the Paralympics. And Nigeria's GDP per capita is around 10 times less than Poland, which also has six gold medals.
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C
In the case of Nigeria, what's probably not appreciated fully is that it's got a population of something like 160 million. There is quite a significant talent pool.
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B
Simon Shibley speculates that Nigeria may prioritise its Paralympics team because you can get wins for less money in these Games. Rwanda, Bosnia Herzegovina, Iran and Iraq also stand out in our spreadsheet. They've all entered more athletes into the Paralympics than the Olympics. Now, we've had a question from Anna Mouton in South Africa, who says she's always amazed by the number of songs you can recognise on hearing just the first second or two of music. So her question to more or less is, since music has a limited number of building blocks and there are mathematical rules for how these can be combined to sound musical, is it possible to calculate the total number of particular potential opening bars? Surely, she says, it must be finite. Will Tim Harford challenge Yan Wong to figure it out? Yan is an evolutionary biologist specialising in computer and mathematical modeling of evolutionary genetics. Basically our go to man when the maths gets too hard for us. But first, we had a little test of our own for him.
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E
Okay, what were they?
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F
Well, the first one was Thriller, wasn't it? The trouble is my memory's not very good. I can't remember the other two.
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E
Thriller, Great Balls of Fire, I think, and Another One Bites the Dust. So, Jan, it is an interesting question. How on earth did you go about answering it?
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F
Well, I think actually there's something going on here with what we just listened to, where we're not just listening to the notes, we're listening to the sort of quality of the sound. And I think that's what most people actually do. And it sounds like the questioner was asking, really, if you just take the notes and the speed at which the notes are played, and that's a bit easier, you can try and sort of enumerate out the mathematical possibilities. There are a lot of them, like, really quite a lot, because it seemed
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E
to me, I guess, I just had in mind the number of keys on a piano. Well, you know, there aren't that many. Say you're going to play three or four notes. I mean, obviously you get many thousands of possibilities. But clearly my intuition is off here.
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F
Well, there's a thing called the combinatorial explosion. So the more possible little choices you make, they add up to enormous amounts. So if you just took the rhythm and you imagine you could, say, fit 32 sort of beats into two bars, then you're talking about about 4 billion rhythms that you can fit in. If you throw notes and chords and you get numbers that are well over the number of atoms in the observable universe. Of course, real music doesn't explore all that space.
- [07:11]
E
That was going to be my question, because you can't just thump several different notes on a piano and call that a tune. I mean, actually, the number of different combinations that composers must have in practice explored must be much smaller.
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F
Much, much smaller. The problem is the listener thought there might be sort of mathematical ways you could narrow that down. I don't think there are any. There isn't any strict thing that allows us to say, this noise is music, this noise is not music.
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E
That's the kind of the pure maths approach to this, the combinatorial approach. Do we have any empirical evidence?
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F
Yes, very first bit of a song. It's called the musical insipit. There are databases of that. There are maybe a couple of hundred thousand of those in various databases around the place. And people have tried sort of mining these because some of the listeners might know websites where you can type in tunes or Sing tunes, hum. Hum a tune and it tries to recognize what the tune is.
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E
Okay, so what do we learn from these databases?
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F
As long as you take into account both the sort of pitch and the rhythm, then you can identify a large number of tunes. You can narrow it down to just one tune within about eight notes, probably more like six to eight notes. You can use those first sections to try and work out how constrained the music is compared to sort of just allowing any old notes to go. It turns out that real songs do explore quite a lot of the space. The predictability of just a random set of notes. They're very unpredictable.
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E
Yeah, if you played me four notes and it's totally random, I have no idea what the fifth note's going to be.
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F
The predictability of a song is not that much more predictable from these measures of insipids, the starts of songs. And so it seems like you explain exploring a reasonably large amount of the mathematical sort of space when you're writing songs.
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E
The amount of music out there is almost unlimited. And yet we still have X Factor. Jan Wong, thank you very much.
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B
Thank you, Jan Wong. Never wrong. If you've got a number Y question, do email it to moreorelessbc.co.uk and you can download and rock out to lots of other editions of More or less@bbcworldservice.com more or less. It was presented by me, Ruth Alexander. The editor was Richard Varden.
- [09:20]
A
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