What is it about?
Countries have limited resources to invest in elite sport, so they must decide whether to concentrate support on a small number of Olympic sports or spread it across a wider range. Our study examines which of these approaches is associated with greater Olympic success. We analyse all countries competing at the Summer Olympic Games between 1996 and 2024. Instead of relying on often unavailable and difficult-to-compare funding data, we use the composition of each country’s Olympic team as a proxy for how strongly it prioritises different sports. The results suggest there is no single best strategy. Countries with highly diversified portfolios and countries with highly concentrated portfolios both tend to perform better than those following an intermediate approach. Diversified strategies are associated with higher predicted medal shares and success across a wider range of sports, while more concentrated strategies tend to produce somewhat lower but more consistent outcomes. We also find that countries tend to win more medals in the sports they prioritise most strongly. Overall, the findings suggest that Olympic success depends not only on how many resources a country has, but also on making a clear and coherent choice about how those resources are distributed across sports.
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Why is it important?
What makes this study distinctive is that it examines Olympic resource-allocation strategies across all countries competing at the Summer Olympic Games from 1996 to 2024, rather than relying on a small group of successful nations. It also introduces a new way to study prioritisation: the composition of a country’s Olympic delegation, adjusted for medal opportunities, is used as an observable proxy for how strongly different sports are emphasised. This helps overcome the lack of comparable sport-by-sport funding data across countries. The study is timely because governments and national sport organisations face growing pressure to use limited elite-sport resources effectively. Our results show that there is no single optimal model: both strong diversification and strong prioritisation can be associated with success, while intermediate strategies tend to perform worse. This can help policymakers move beyond the simple question of whether to “focus or diversify” and instead think more carefully about strategic coherence, national resources and performance objectives. The findings may also be useful beyond Olympic sport. They provide a new empirical way to study how public organisations allocate scarce resources across competing priorities, and they offer national Olympic committees and sport funding agencies evidence that can inform future investment decisions.
Perspectives
For me, the most interesting part of this study is that it challenges the idea that there must be one universally “best” way to organise Olympic investment. I expected prioritisation and diversification to represent competing choices, but the results suggest that both can work when pursued clearly and consistently. What seems most problematic is the middle ground, where a country neither concentrates strongly enough to build clear advantages nor diversifies broadly enough to benefit from a wide portfolio. I also see the methodological contribution as especially valuable. Using Olympic delegation composition as a proxy for strategic emphasis allows us to study a much wider range of countries than would be possible with funding data alone. For me, this opens up new possibilities for comparing national sport strategies in a more systematic and inclusive way
Professor Imre Fertő
Eotvos Lorand Tudomanyegyetem
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: Prioritising or diversifying in Olympic summer sports? Olympic delegation composition as a new proxy for resource Allocation, International Journal of Sport Policy and Politics, September 2026, Taylor & Francis,
DOI: 10.1080/19406940.2026.2727433.
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