Standing Up for Blighty

"Of course he's not going to win!" I shouted at the telly. "He's British!" Sure enough, moments later, the British athlete finished his event well below the first place that the commentator assured us was well within his grasp.
Sound familiar? Anyone watching as much Olympics as I have while I've been unemployed will know just how frustrating the first week was for team GB, and all those like me, watching and hoping, that (just for once) we could buck the trend and actually win something.
I watched as a fresh crop of swimmers lined up on their marks. "As long as he beats the French man." I said. The starter's pistol fired, and they were off. "Come on... Beat the Frenchie.. Beat the Frenchie. Beat the Frenchie, beat the.... Awww...."
So I thought I'd write something about Brits not winning anything...
And then I thought about it.
And the more I thought about it, the more I decided it didn't matter.
It's easy to paint Britain as a nation of losers. We can wheel out Sir Clive Sinclair, and laugh at his silly car. We can wheel out Beagle 2, and sadly shake our heads as Prof Colin Pillinger tells us that "Next time we should try to make landing our first priority." And if we want to strike below the belt we can always bring on the hard hitters. Remember Eddie the Eagle? Our love affair with losers has made national icons of Donald Campbell, Captain Robert Scott, and Sir Ernest Shackleton, not to mention Del-Boy Trotter and Frank Spencer.
We love losers. We love to see fallibility, even in our heroes. Winners piss us off. As Gary Newman discovered' "Being famous wasn't about realising that everybody loved me. It was about discovering that ninety percent of the population hated me." Our winners, if we must put up with them, should at least have the good grace to be humble about it. Good old honest shock at winning often helps, or, failing that, you could always do a Matthew and sob your way through the award ceremony.
But I was saying - although this is the popular view of Not so Great Britain, we're not actually that bad. Just look at Sir Clive Sinclair's Track record. He marketted the world's first pocket calculator(1972), the world's first digital watch(1976), and the world's first pocket television(1977). How many of our cool and trendy mobile phones would look the same were it not for him? It's often said that he had no head for business, but in 1983, the ZX Spectrum sold at 12,000 units a week. Sir Clive was the chairman for MENSA from 1980 to 1997, during which time its membership soared from 1,700 to 38,000. All that and still all we ever hear about is the silly looking Sinclair C5 car. (Mainly thanks to Japser Carrott, of course. At least Sir Clive wrote all his own jokes.)

Okay. I've stood up for one Brit. Only another 59,999,999 to go.
The medals table for this year's Olympics placed team GB tenth overall. We were below France and Germany, Japan and South Korea. We only finished one place above Cuba. Does this make us the sick man of the civilised world? Not in my book. Just look at how we've done in the whole of the modern Olympics. This table (which at the time of writing excludes the latest results) shows Great Britain placed third, above France and Australia.
What is particularly interesting, though, is what happens when you look at the amount of medals won per capita. You can see here that we still do quite well, (still better than the French) were as the USA fall way behind the odds.
We're a small nation, so it makes sense that we have less of a pool to pick from. It makes sense that America should sweep most of the medals when they enter enough athletes to invade a small country.
But the demographic for per capita medals did strike me as rather interesting. Have you noticed that the majority of successes come from a small cluster of north-European countries? Check out the map and you'll see that Finland, Sweden, Hungary and Denmark are well ahead. And this is the figure given for the summer Olympics. It's not as if all the skiers are on hand to push up their totals.
The more I looked at the map, the more striking the case seemed that Protestant countries, or at least countries that are predominantly Protestant, seem to be much better off in terms of success. Sociologist and Economist Max Weber (1864 - 1920) first created the concept of "The Protestant Work Ethic" in which he sets out the theory that while Catholics see money and power as immoral, the Protestant key to salvation comes through hard work, meaning that personal wealth and triumph are simply by-products of their well spent time. Could this same ideology relate to success in the Olympic games?
Gregg Easterbrook wrote an article on this which you can read here, in which this topic is entertainingly explored. Although very Pro-American in its language, it's still worth a look: "As the Catholic theologian Michael Novak wrote in "The Joy of Sports," "The spirit of play is Catholic; the spirit of work is Protestant." Touch football in the park, pickup basketball, tennis, or swimming with your friends - at essence, are play. Training for the Olympics - at essence, is work."
So there you go. I think Britain is Great because we win a few Olympic medals, and Ya-boo Sucks to everyone else. But medal tallies are only a small part of the equation. A short while ago I heard about the sheer amount of technical and scientific output that we still contribute to the world. This article by David Dickson has some pretty amazing things to say about Britain's place in the world of science. For example, did you know that: "Overall, researchers in eight countries alone — headed by the United States, the United Kingdom, Germany and Japan — produce almost 85 per cent of the world's leading science; 163 countries, including most of the developing world, accounts for less than 2.5 per cent."
Or my personal favourite: "Perhaps the most revealing is the relative strength that King's analysis reveals of science in the United Kingdom compared to that of other European countries. Overall publication rates alone demonstrate this; during the period 1997-2001, for example, British scientists were responsible for 9.43 per cent of the world's output of scientific papers (as registered by ISI), compared to 8.76 per cent for Germany and 6.39 per cent for France, even though expenditure on science in the latter two countries was significantly higher."