The vast difference in the denominators makes it unworkable for me. Almost any individual country overtakes China by winning a single gold.
China needs to take gold at a 59:1 ratio to keep pace with Australia.
Nothing normalizes the denominator.
A different approach is: percent of Golds taken versus percent of world population. On this AUS still does rather well, and China is observed to pull a respectable 146% of population weighted anticipated gold.
When assessing a population's recovery of a resource, the amount of the resource is critical. A stand alone scaler doesn't communicate much about the dynamic.
In this case China (about 19% of the world's people) is recovering about 28% of the available resource (Gold medals).
Where the others fall, particularly in lightly populated countries is statisical rubbish unitl the availble resource (Gold rewarded) becomes large enough for their puny population to be measured. Can't do stats on n=1.
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