Abstract
The study aimed to describe the incidence of Olympic medalists naturalized at the Rio de Janeiro Olympic Games in 2016. It is a quantitative research of a descriptive nature. The results show that 6.6% of the medals were distributed to naturalized athletes, which corresponds to 6.9% of the total medal-winning athletes. The results also point out that most of the migratory flow of medalist athletes occurred from countries with lower economic performance to those with higher economic performance and from countries with lower Olympic performance to countries with higher Olympic performance. The conclusions indicate that the current context of naturalization of athletes tends to be more beneficial to countries with high economic and Olympic performance, as well as to countries with high economic performance, but without tradition in sport, being disadvantageous to countries with low economic performance.
Keywords:
Sports; Human migration; Athletes; Medals