I thought this was interesting, here is a paper from a professor at Tuck (via the Freakonomics blog), who has built a quantitative model to predict the number of Olympic medals for each country:
http://mba.tuck.dartmouth.edu/pages/faculty/andrew.bernard/Beijing2008.pdf

Thanks for the link. It’s an interesting paper, and its projections are holding up well. Possibly the biggest surprise is the number of gold medals China has won. As of this morning, China has captured 39 gold medals, almost twice that of the 22 won by the US.

Most of China’s medals can be explained by:

- centralized planning. In a socialist society, the government can choose who plays what sport and have them practice full time from early childhood. Lebron James may have been an athelete in a different sport than hoops if he could win more medals for the country.
- standard deviations. With more than a billion people, you are more likely to get outstanding athletes. Even given the average height of Chinese citizens, there is no shortage of 6′10″ + atheletes for basketball and volleyball, etc.

BTW, if you add up the medals for the former Soviet Union (granted there is some double counting), by my count they have 104 total medals compared to 93 for the United States and 83 for China.