Using linear regression (OLS) for olympic medals [Research]

The aim of my thesis is to examine the determinants of Olympic medal performance across countries.

Specifically number of athletes, GDP, GDP per capita, HDI, Population, Inflation, Urbanisation, Unemployment, country size , host dummy (if they ever organized an olympics) and democracy index as explanatory variables.

Going through the material of my econometics class, I performed a Wald-test in GRETL using OLS with robust standard errors (HC1), and it left me with nr of athletes, GDP, country size ( square meters) and democracy index using a 10% significance level.

Then I performed a Ramsey RESET Test but the results did not indicate significant misspecification. Still, when trying to make scatter or residual plots, there’s barely any linearity for democracy and country size.

There’s heteroskedasticity (I am using robust standard errors), and the distribution of the olympic medals is not normal ( though my sample is quite big, 125 countries, including those who haven’t won any medals in the year 2021.)

Is my method completely wrong, as in using OLS for this