[cognito20]

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i think i'm done with this debate for now dean. it's kinda boring when you are the only one who actually knows anything about _both_ the sports being discussed.

perhaps we can resume this discussion next year when australia and a population 1/15th the size of the usa proceeds to win half as many olympic medals as them.

yeti out

105,942 and counting

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Good point. Australia has won more medals per capita than the United States in all of the last 11 Summer Olympic Games in which both competed, more medals per capita (10+ medals won minimum) than ANY nation in the last 4 Summer Olympics, and have won medals in each of the last 4 WINTER OLYMPICS (including 2 golds in 2006 and 1 gold in 2002), despite having nothing that we in the northern US or Canada would recognize as winter. In addition, there are currently 35 Australians playing professional baseball in the United States. FYI, in Australia, baseball is not taken at all seriously as a major sport...it's kind of comparable to soccer over here - it's a sport that has the reputation as something that kids play until a certain age, before they move on to the "real" sports. And still they have _35_ players playing professionally over here, in a sport they don't take seriously. Australia is also the home of perhaps the world's most cardiovascularly demanding sport, Australian Rules Football, basically (and this is a bit of a simplification, but not much) a legalized version of "kill the man with the ball", played on an oval about twice the length of an American football or soccer field, for 4 20-minute quarters. If you've ever seen AFL players, you might notice that they all have practically the same build - ripped marathon runners. Aussie Rules is an intensely physically demanding sport, surely as demanding in its own way as the NFL, with a little less emphasis on physical strength and a lot more emphasis on endurance and stamina.

I have to agree with yeti here...if you're judging on a POUND-FOR-POUND basis, the world's dominant sporting nation is NOT the United States. It is Australia. They are an international sporting power despite having only 7.3% of the US's population.