Canada's Medal Count at the 2012 Olympic Games

This story ran a few months back in the National Post but it is worth a re-post as the games draw near. I find it exciting to see that a fairly simple model can predict the Olympic medal count so accurately. I assume that the prediction formula is based on a regression model and if I was teaching a forecasting course I would want to try to estimate this. Congratulations to Professor Dan Johnson for working this out! His predictions show that for the 2012 games, the US is still the country to beat but China and Russia will both do very well. Perhaps a bit disappointing is that Canada is predicted to win a total of just 17 medals, one fewer than it won in 2008. Notice that Australia and Hungary, two countries with smaller populations than Canada are predicted to win more medals than Canada.