Many systems in nature and society have a power‐law relationship (yxn= constant) between pairs of variables that do not seem to have any obvious functional dependence. Such relationships result in a straight line with slope n, on a log‐log plot of the two variables. Examples of these straight‐line plots have appeared in the literature for more than a century, but only recently were they named“fractals,”by Mandelbrot. We have examined the relationship between the population (x) of participating countries and the number of athletes per million people (y) sent to the 1992 Olympic games in Barcelona for the 20 most successful medal‐winning nations and found the existence of a power‐law dependence (n = 0.80±0.05). Similar inverse fractal relationships were also found between the number of medals won per million people and population size, as well as between athletic contingent size per million people or medals per million people and the Gross Domestic Product of the country. Such interdependence has not, to our knowledge, been previously reported for international athletic events.