Demographic and economic characteristics have been shown to provide
important predictive power for determining a country’s success in the
Olympic Games. This paper extends such research, providing a set of
predictions for the gold medals and total medals each country will win at the
2006 Winter Olympics. We expected Germany to win the most medals,
followed by the United States, Norway, Italy, Austria, and Canada. For total
medals, the overall correlation between the predictions and the actual results
was 0.934. While Germany and the United States did finish in the top two
places, there were some surprises as Canada, Austria, and Russia performed
better than expected, while Norway and Italy did not live up to expectations.