The Olympics are finally in the books. After a year delay and constant questions about if it will even go on at all we made it through. All we have left to do is tally up the medals to see who won the nation-on-nation athletic battle.
There’s several ways to measure a nation’s success. If you’re a smaller country it’s fairly simple, take a look at how well you met or exceeded expectations with medals – countries like the Philippines getting their first ever Olympic gold will count it as a success. But this way of counting is more an internal reflection. To measure how you did against other countries there’s only two ways to count – the number of gold medals and the number of total medals. In most countries they only use the gold count, anything else is pointless. In the United States, they go the other way to measure things – like they do to measure everything else – and count total medals. Both have their merits and we’ll dive into them now.
First, let’s take a look at the gold medal count. It’s the most popular way to count the medals – and the Ricky Bobby way, if you’re not first you’re last. Frankly, it’s quite surprising this isn’t the way it’s scored in the United States. But we’ll get to that in a second. Really it makes the most sense to count this way, the Olympics is a way to show patriotism and you want to be the best at something so counting the sports you’re the best at just makes the most sense. However, this also shows how great your superstars are. It relies on nothing other than having a few great athletes in a greater number of sports. You don’t need depth. This is the best way to measure countries that have large sporting populations compared to countries with smaller populations. It’s the fairest way to judge a countries success.
Conversely, the total medal count shows your depth. It’s for the jack-of-all-trades countries. Typically you’re going to get the world powers in to top these categories – sometimes the host country will be there too by virtue of them getting automatic bids in every event. This year the top overall medals were the United States, China, Russia, and Great Britain. Rounding out the top 5 was the host country, Japan. You can probably pencil in these countries for summer games success every time. In a way though, it makes sense to use this as your measuring stick. They give out awards to the top 3 participants in every event, so you might as well count how many awards you received. It might not show you’re the best of the best, but the award is there so you might as well count it.
When you look at the overall totals, you’ll understand why the United States uses this method for counting – they top it almost every year. The leader in Gold, Silver, and Bronze medals each this year was the United States. That dominance in each category ensured they would run away with the overall crown. I’m sure it’s not just in the United States, but every country wants to show that they’re the best in some way or another. The United States counting the overall medals shows they are the best, and second isn’t even close.
There was some anxiety in the Gold medal count, the leader here was in doubt up until the final 5 events of the games. In the end though, the United States came away with it beating out China by a single gold. The way the United States came away with this crown was a little unconventional. They didn’t have their normal dominance on the track, at least on the men’s side. They also fell short of their normal haul in women’s gymnastics. While those two sports under performed Swimming continued to be the anchor in the medal count winning over a quarter of the gold medals. The women in track and field stepped up as advertised and came home with the next most golds. They did it not by dominating their traditional events, but showing up in middle distance events and in a couple of field events. Wrapping up with dominant sports were shooting, basketball, and possibly the most surprising – wrestling. Each giving team USA 3 gold medals.
In the end it doesn’t matter how you measure your success. It will vary from country to country – and they’ll measure it to make sure it looks good back home. In the end you’re going to have to break it down and look at each country individually to determine if they had a successful campaign. The United States this year was again dominant on the medal counts, despite finishing with disappointing results in some of their stronger events from past years. In the end it was a fantastic two weeks of sports and we get to look forward to the winter version in 6 months.