Success in the Olympic Games is usually focused on medals, especially gold ones, and countries are usually ranked in terms of the number of medals won, and sometimes as medals per million of population or gross domestic product.
Examining individual countries this way yields some clues as to what is associated with success, but other striking insights emerge when the countries that won medals are divided into groups.
I’ve divided the 88 countries that won medals in the 2016 Rio Games into four large groups ranked by population (one group contains the 22 most populous nations, the next group 22 which are the next largest bloc, and so on) and also into four large groups ranked by total wealth.