Can Canada win the most Olympic medals for the first time in history?

The 2010 Winter Olympics kick off in Vancouver, Canada tonight. The host country often rises to the occasion and posts a team performance beyond their previous norms. China claimed 100 medals in Beijing in 2008. Their previous best was 63 in Athens in 2004.

Can Canada use their home field advantage? As we did two years ago in projecting the medal counts for the 2008 Games, I teamed up with Matthew Futterman and The Wall Street Journal to project medal counts for 86 events (click here for the details). A total of 258 overall medals. We took into account recent national and international competitions in every Olympic sport and conducted many interviews with experts. Then, instead of an absolute first-, second- and third-place finisher in each event, we assigned probabilities to the top medal contenders.

For example, in Hockey, the usual picks are Canada for the gold, Russia for silver and the Czech Republic for bronze. The U.S. has an outside chance for a medal. However, when we do our projections we assign probabilities like this:

We have Canada as the favorite to win the gold, but despite the fact they are the best team, we feel it is more likely that one of the other countries will win. We feel they are a certainty to win one of the three medals, but not necessarily a gold. USA is not shown for a medal in hockey in regular projections, but we give them a chance. And that chance counts in our projection.

We then add up all the probabilities to determine the projected medal counts for each country. Here are our projections for the top five countries:

The answer is yes. For the first time in the history of the Games, Canada will take home the most medals, and the most golds. Germany won in 2006 with 11 golds and 29 total medals and we have them pretty much repeating their performance. But Canada's home ice and snow advantage will push them over the top, allowing them to surpass their 2006 performance in Turin, Italy of 7 gold medals and 24 total. After coming in third in Turin in the medal count (with USA second), Canada will switch places with Germany in 2010.

Using the probabilities for each event, we ran 1,000 simulations. Canada took the most medals 772 times, USA 240 times and Germany 84 times (including ties). It's looking good for the host country.