For those who like that sort of thing. Interesting that the NYT shows the US finishing first because of the overall count, but China’s official service shows them finishing first. Because of the golds.
One gets the impression that this was very important to China. So important that certain rules may have been internally waived.
Interesting side note: Combine the counts for the component parts of the former Soviet Union and they would have borne the bell away, both in gold medals and overall.
When you look at it per capita – taking Olympic ability as distributed across a normal curve and applied to each population – Australia leads the overall list, followed by Cuba and Belarus. Australia’s government spent Aus$16.7 million for each gold medal, while New Zealand amortizes their $10million across all medals.
Another test is to control for GDP, since wealthier countries might be expected to spend more on leisure opportunities. Get ready for this: Jamaica, Zimbabwe and North Korea are efficiency leaders, if you count overall medals by trillion dollars of GDP. Mongolia trails Jamaica for second in that crowd when sorting gold medals per trillion of GDP, with North Kora nudging out Zimbabwe for third.
Actually, it’s proving surprisingly difficult to piggyback on someone else’s per capita and GDP analysis this morning – there doesn’t seem to be an authoritative list. If I’ve got the bandwidth, I’ll give it a shot a little later.
Lex … the medal count had me baffled for most of the Games. I checked each day to see the total count, and the US was leading China. Then — boom — this morning China is shown as winner in total medal count. Thanks for your analysis. My private thoughts were along the lines of China deciding “whatever we have to do, the results are going to favor us, not our hated rivals.”
I have always felt that there was a lot of behind the scenes chicanery in judged sports, like figure skating and gymnastics, which somewhat spoils the Winter Olympics for me. But seldom is it quite this blatant. No matter how we struggle to make sports competitions truly fair, some human being, some human rascality is going to screw it up.
Marianne
Lex, Lex, Lex….
You’re falling into contractor speak with “If I’ve got the bandwidth”. I assume you’re speaking about your personal time and not your cable/dsl modem.
Tsk tsk
Guilty as charged.
Whaddaya gonna do?
Bandwidth.
Isn’t that geek-speak for girth??
mmmm hmmmm yep. I think it is.
While the former USSRs medal count would be leading, I don’t think the delta would be as high. Due to the multiple countries, you likely had some of the FSU countries competing and medaling in same event, thus accumulating 2-3 medals for a single event, whereas if they were competing as the USSR, they would have only been alowed to field one competitive team.
As far as the Chinese cheating with ages and who knows what else, did anyone expect anything less from them?
claudio
WK, always trying to start something…
WK, always trying to start something…
lex, always encouraging her…
Too bad you don’t have comments back up or I could link to that old comment party for proof. Ran out of cold water, IIRC. Of course, I just sat there silently sipping my cosmopolitan…
For all the olympics I have watched the medal leader board has been in order of gold medals. This usually only made a difference at the bottom of the medal table i.e 1 gold is better than 2 silvers.