I stumbled across a sports article from a US publication and thought it interesting that it showed the USA leading the medals table.
Instead of the regular table that gives weight to Gold, silver and bronze, they just see total medals.
I sorta like it. Celebrating all medal winners equally is nice. It feels a little like fudging the numbers, though.
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It is fudging the numbers. It’s an odd thing they do to stir up nationalism or something.
And in the end it was all a bit for naught - since they now top the table using a normal measure anyway.
American exceptionalism at its finest.
Happy cake day!
It’s absurd. I can see having an issue with the official system, for example if one nation got 2nd in literally every single event the official system would put them near the bottom of the table, which is a little unfair. But giving equal weight is so, so much worse. I saw a meme the other day showing American swimmers on the 2nd and 3rd place podium and an Aussie in 1st, with a headline to the effect of “America beats Australia in swimming”. You don’t celebrate them all equally because they didn’t perform equally. The logical extension of that would be to sort merely by number of participants each country had. Which is absurd. Gold needs to be worth more than bronze for a system to even be worth considering.
A points system could be reasonable. My view is that 1 gold should be better than 2 silver, so 7-3-1 points is where I’d start. That would change the top from CN, FR, JP, AU, GB, SK, US, to FR, CN, US, AU, JP, GB, SK, if I’ve done my calculations correctly. You get the same order currently if you do 10-4-1 as points. But the conventional system is pretty good anyway.
I found the meme I mentioned above. Thank the gods for never closing old tabs 🙃
Ha! I love it!
Ok, so maybe not all medals are equal after all.That is an Australian person making a joke.
Sorry for the late reply. Just cleaning up old tabs…
But anyway, yes. That’s correct. Obviously. But it’s also the natural implication of counting total medals rather than golds or a well-balanced point system.
That’s cause Americans are much like ruasians. They think they’re the best and unstoppable.
China should always be at the forefront of medal totals. They have such a huge population to pick from their best should be up there.
And India?
They only have two sports in India. Cricket and not-cricket. Of the two, cricket gets most of the money and almost all of the attention.
Hahaha, There is that.
I wonder how medal tally per capita would work out. Surely Australia would be up there. 🤔
That would be a really interesting metric.
America get one medal per every 9,008,108people
Australia gets one medal per 1,444,444 people
China is one medal per 58,833,333 people
So Australia is doing pretty well. I can’t be bothered doing it for any more countries right now though
I played with something like “medals per capita” once during the London Olympics. When you put them into that metric, Australia definitely punches above its weight, but I think New Zealand did even better.
So that’s objectively a worse measure then. We need a measure where were the best. Not NZ, not UK and not China or USA.
How about medals divided by average population density inversed, lol.
It’s awesome seeing them and Great Britain below us on the real medal tally.
Don’t get too excited, the water events will finish soon and our medal tally will slow right down. Happens every time. 😁
Yeah I know but it’s nice at the moment.
Don’t they do this every year? They count total medals or total gold - they switch to whatever metric puts them at the top.
As an American, it’s not surprising.
We have to fudge the medals score just like we fudge the healthcare score and the education score and the poverty score and the equality score and the freedom score. I just don’t understand why medals are on that list.
We still have the biggest billionaires, right?
They also send the most athletes.
I was wondering what the context for this Chaser article was.
Aren’t tables typically sorted by the total column? Plus on the US one you can sort by any column, unlike the other one.
Not in competitions with medals; those are most commonly ordered by gold medals.
Medal count alone doesn’t even mean anything. How many events has the country participated in? 20 medals in 20 events is impressive, 20 medals in 100 events is not as impressive.
Total medals and total golds are both bad sorting measures. It should be a simple point system, gold > silver > bronze. Maybe 4/2/1?
yeah I mean except for some exceptions where the gold blows everyone out of the water so often the difference between the medal holders is basically luck.
