“…Empirical studies of the Olympics may be divided into those examining a single tournament (Snyder, 1936;Ball, 1972;Novikov and Maximenko, 1973;Levine, 1974;Grimes et al , 1974;Colwell, 1981Colwell, , 1982Condon et al , 1999) or an analysis of aggregate performance over several tournaments (Jokl, 1964;Sappanen, 1970;Sutphen, 1973, Johnson andAli, 2000;Bernard and Busse, 2000). Other studies have examined miscellaneous aspects of the Olympics, including the hypothesis that differences in Olympic success are partially influenced by national orientation (Luschen, 1972;Gillis, 1980;Sappanen, 1981), satisfaction among Olympic medallists (Medvec et al , 1995), the performance of Soviet Bloc athletes (Shughart and Tomlinson, 1993), the notion of outcome uncertainty (Baimbridge, 1998), and the notions of effectiveness and efficiency (Gratton, 1988). The following is a brief outline of some of the more recent studies.…”