🏅 Who's Winning The 2026 Olympic Medal Race — And Who's Beating History?

A look at which nations are outperforming (or falling short of) their historical share of Olympic medals in 2026 events completed so far.

08 February 2026, Italy, Mailand: Olympic Winter Games Milan Cortina 2026, speed skating 5000 meters, men, the Olympic rings and the Olympic logo on the ice. (Peter Kneffel/picture alliance via Getty Images)

This is more of a tracker/interactive than a proper story, but it’s something I have been wanting to put together since doing this story last week with Brendan Farrell about the countries that tend to dominate the Winter Olympics (and why):

As part of that historical-dominance angle, it’s usually not a bad policy to judge each country’s performance at the Olympics in the context of what they’ve been good at (or not) in the past. Going back to our story, Norway will probably always be a fixture atop the medal table as long as sports like cross-country skiing and speed skating are fixtures in the Olympic programme.

That’s why I’ve always found the usual Olympic medal trackers to be a bit underwhelming. A certain country might be high or low, but have they won more than expected to this point? Were all their good events front- or back-loaded? Are they supposed to do better going forward?

To remedy this in the past, I would create trackers that served as quasi-projections, using each country’s past three cycles (weighted by recency and adjusted for home advantage) to forecast their medal odds in each event. I don’t really have the bandwidth to recreate that fully this year, but I’m hoping what follows is a decent approximation that still can provide the service of tracking Olympic countries’ medal progress relative to what they’ve done historically.

To that end, I used data from the amazing Olympedia to calculate each country’s share of the all-time gold/silver/bronze medals in a given sport (among nations actually competing in that sport this cycle), and applied those rates to the medals that have actually been awarded thus far, tracking who has more or less medals — and “medal points”¹ — than we’d expect from their historical rates in the sports that have given out medals:²

This allows us to look at who is above/below what we’d expect their historical pace to be, given the number of medals awarded at any given moment. It also gives us a rough way to track who might have more medals in the future, based on who is good at the sports that remain outstanding. And we can add that value to actual past medals if we want to get an overall expected value for each medal type by Olympics’ end.

This is far from a perfect way to forecast Olympic medals: Again, it is based on data going back to 1924, treating those games as equal to, say, 2022 in the overall data. It doesn’t account for home advantage, which explains why Italy is already among the leading nations in exceeding expectations. But simple trackers like this can still be useful, as they tell us things like how much being the host is worth (by seeing how much better Italy does than usual), or who has improved — or declined — versus their historical norms. Some simple context is better than none at all.

Anyway, hopefully you’ll find this a useful tool during the 2026 Winter Olympics. If I did things right, it should update automatically whenever Olympedia’s data updates… though we’ll see how that plan holds up in practice. In the meantime, think of this less as a definitive forecast and more as a running context machine. The Olympics are about shiny metal, yes — but they’re also about expectation versus reality. This tracker is my attempt to measure the gap between the two.

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Filed under: Olympics, Updating Models

1. Which just assigns 3 points for gold, 2 for silver and 1 for bronze.

2. For new sports such as Ski Mountaineering, the base rates came from each country’s success in the Youth Olympic Games.