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Fact of the Day: Olympics Edition

The Nobel Prize/Olympic medal divide

by
Adam Chandler
August 09, 2012

For those disheartened by Israel’s poor, shutout performance in the Olympics this year–a panel is being appointed to investigate the failure–there is a silver lining.

According to some crowdsourcing among the Twitterati, Israel is one of six countries in the world with more Nobel prizes (10) than Olympic medals (7). The others are Myanmar, Guatemala, East Timor, Yemen, Bangladesh, and St Lucia. And of those countries, it looks like Israel has the most of both.

This is, of course, the last-picked-in-kickball riposte. But we’ll take it.

Adam Chandler was previously a staff writer at Tablet. His work has appeared in the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, the Atlantic, Slate, Esquire, New York, and elsewhere. He tweets @allmychandler.