Julia Bredtmann, Carsten J. Crede, and Sebastian Otten, Ruhr University Bochum, Germany, already predicted the final medals at the 2012 Olympic Games. Their forcast does not take into consideration the training status of the participating athletes. Instead, they have entered political, economic, demographic and cultural data into their model. 

Retrospectively their ‘forecast’ of previous games was amazing: It correlates up to 97.4 % with the actual medals table of participating countries of the Athens games in 2004 and up to 96.9 % of the Beijing games in 2008.

The team forecast that China, USA, and Russia will top the score table with 102, 100, and 71 medals, respectively. They expect that the British will take home more medals than before (57). Brazil (28) increases its medal standing in anticipation of the games being held in Rio de Janeiro in 2016, whereas the German team will win 12 % fewer medals and slide down to 36 medals in the medals table.

• Predicted Medals for 172 Countries at the 2012 Olympic Games,
  Julia Bredtmann, Carsten J. Crede, Sebastian Otten,
  https://sites.google.com/site/olympicmedalspredictions/olympic-games-2012