Towards fair ranking of Olympics achievements: the case of Sydney 2000

In this paper, the issue of whether it is possible to design an objective impartial system of analysis of the Olympic results, which the majority of participating countries would agree upon, is analyzed by discussing different ways of ranking the performance of participating countries at Sydney 2000 Olympic Games. It is demonstrated that key measures frequently reported in the media lack the necessary descriptive power. The productivity measurement approach is used for modelling the multiple objective nature of the underlying situation. The unsupervised data mining technique of self-organizing maps is used to group the participating countries into homogenous clusters. The Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA)-based model is then used for producing a new ranking of participating teams acceptable as "fair" by the majority of participants. (c) 2004 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.