(off topic) Best country at the Olympics????

by Bairdy on Aug 23, 2008 11:39 PM PDT Comment 25 comments

Hey all,

As the Olympics draw to a close I just wanted to get everyone's idea about how the best coutry should be judged.

General perception is the country that has won the most gold is considered to have been the best over the course of the 2 weeks. Going by this then China is considered to be the best at this Olympics winning 50 gold medals.

The flip side of the coin is to look at the total number of medals won to consider who has performed the best, now I note that most of the American sites like ESPN, Yahoo (America) have gone with this theory in the fact that American would be on top with a total of 108 medals 10 clear of China.

So should it be Gold won or overall medals? Should a country that has won 10 silver be considered better than a team that has won 7 Gold?

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How do they usually do it?

by CaptainSexyJacob on Aug 23, 2008 11:41 PM PDT reply actions 0 recs

Gold Medals I think

Pretty sure it is on Gold medals one.

That is a bit of the qestion I was wondering should it be done that way or total medals won?

by Bairdy on Aug 24, 2008 12:11 AM PDT up reply actions 0 recs

Gold Medals ftw!

Most medals is nice, but the song is called “go for gold”.

Odenied: Asked whether he noticed Oden favoring his right knee, Frye dismissed it entirely. "He favors dunking on your head, that's what he favors."

by Norsktroll on Aug 24, 2008 2:31 AM PDT up reply actions 0 recs

Assign points to the medals!

You really can’t go by medal counts because gold is better than silver, and silver is better than bronze.

I tend to think two silvers might equal a gold medal, and two bronzes might equal a silver medal. So if I assigned point values,

Gold medal = 4 points
Silver medal = 2 points
Bronze medal = 1 point

USA
35 gold * 4 = 140 points
37 silver * 2 = 74 points
36 bronze * 1 = 36 points
Total = 250 points

China
50 gold * 4 = 200 points
20 silver * 2 = 40 points
28 bronze * 1 = 28 points
Total = 268 points

So I personally think China has turned in a better performance at the Olympics so far.

by Jerryd Oden on Aug 24, 2008 12:13 AM PDT reply actions 0 recs

China,

I think that the problem is that there are way too many olympic sports nowadays. China has the most golds but in what “sports?”

by lethaldose on Aug 24, 2008 12:25 AM PDT up reply actions 0 recs

Right on.

Nice breakdown.

by einman77 on Aug 24, 2008 3:23 AM PDT up reply actions 0 recs

high population = high number of good athletes

it’s just a matter of percentages. The largest countries, population-wise, end up winning the most medals. I’d be curious to see which country has the most medals per capita,

The perfect is the enemy of the good.

by vavoom on Aug 24, 2008 12:32 AM PDT reply actions 0 recs

Lichtenstein

—Dave

by Dave on Aug 24, 2008 1:31 AM PDT up reply actions 0 recs

But only because

Vatican City is not fielding a team this year.

—Dave

by Dave on Aug 24, 2008 1:32 AM PDT up reply actions 0 recs

Unfair

You’d have to weight it by national income, too, because Lichtenstein has enough money to buy all the medals they want.

Other people don't have as much practice at being wrong as I do -- HT, timbo

by jscot on Aug 24, 2008 6:49 AM PDT up reply actions 0 recs

Smaller countries

Probably have an advantage in per capita medals… .in part since larger countries have a limit on the number of competitors in each sport.

by PoliSam on Aug 24, 2008 1:47 AM PDT up reply actions 0 recs

Good theory. Go India. Not.

Odenied: Asked whether he noticed Oden favoring his right knee, Frye dismissed it entirely. "He favors dunking on your head, that's what he favors."

by Norsktroll on Aug 24, 2008 2:30 AM PDT up reply actions 0 recs

excellent rebuttal point

And now could someone who knows a lot about India explain why India does not win many medals at the Olympics?

The perfect is the enemy of the good.

by vavoom on Aug 24, 2008 10:37 AM PDT up reply actions 0 recs

I don't know much about India, but here are some ideas

Sorry for my snide remark, it’s just my belief that winning many medals has at least as much to do with programs (coaches, facilities, financial support, etc.) for specific sports as it has to do with the potential number of people in the country. In fact, a better predictor for success would be: How many people practice a certain sport in a certain country. Thus, countries that are relatively tiny can be huge in certain sports that are national favorites (e.g. Hungary in water polo, South Korea in archery, the Netherlands in field hockey,…).

Of course bigger and more wealthy countries that are politically interested in sports can focus more resources on many disciplines, as China did massively for these Olympics. E.g. China now has armies of gymnasts, divers, rowers, etc. They have constantly raised their medal count over many years, and are now dominating some sports where they didn’t medal at all a decade ago (in fact, historically China has boycotted more Olympics than any other nation, so the had some catching up to do despite being already the most populous nation). In 1984 they had 15 gold, in 1988 only 5, 16 in 1992 and 1996, then 28 in 2000, 32 in 2004 and now finally another massive jump to 51.

Countries and sports that don’t get that much attention from media and politics anymore can fall back. E.g. I read articles that Germany was very disappointed of its swimmers (two golds by one athlete, the rest forgettable) and track and field athletes (just one bronze in almost 50 disciplines, worst performances for almost 100 year)s. They were much more dominant in that field 10 years ago, but now it’s not as popular anymore (and the also cleaned up the sport pretty completely). Germany got their medals in more exotic disciplines now. Whereas in Great Britain you can already see the influence of programs for the games in 2012: They raised their gold medals from 9 to 19 in four years (30 to 47 total).

Odenied: Asked whether he noticed Oden favoring his right knee, Frye dismissed it entirely. "He favors dunking on your head, that's what he favors."

by Norsktroll on Aug 24, 2008 11:35 AM PDT up reply actions 0 recs

Like norkstroll said

It all depends on the amount of focus on the programs the government places as well as sports popularity. Britain’s an example.

by amitp06 on Aug 24, 2008 10:24 PM PDT up reply actions 0 recs

good topic

I have several points to make:

1) While I am of the opinion that ranking by gold medals makes more sense than ranking by total medals, the American media always ranks by total medals even in past Olympics when the USA has had the most in both categories, and in Winter Olympics when the USA never leads in either category.

2) A points system (like 4 for gold, 2 for silver, 1 for bronze) makes more sense, but it is still missing the point. I’m guessing that as well as China did, they would trade one of their 7 diving golds for a medal of any color in basketball. By the same token, I think many Americans would trade a gold in Shooting for the gold in baseball or (particularly among female viewers) the women’s gymnastics team gold medal. Indeed, almost everyone agrees the all around gymnastics gold medal means more than the gold in vault. The point here is that some medals mean more than others, and a true rankings should take that into account. The ideal ranking system would be weighted by the significance of each medal and then somehow normalized for population and GDP.

3) As an American, I’m fine with how team USA did despite having far fewer golds than China- the US did reasonably well in sports I care about/like to watch and it doesn’t bother me that China dominates diving, weightlifting, table tennis and men’s gymnastics. That said, China did the best overall at these Olympics and should be listed first in the traditional medal counts.

Boomshakalaka

by jksnake99 on Aug 24, 2008 11:56 AM PDT reply actions 0 recs

China cheats too

Can’t forget that. The entire gymnastics competition was marred by preteens and horrible judging.

by robrun2 on Aug 24, 2008 12:41 PM PDT reply actions 0 recs

bad judging did exist

but the judges weren’t Chinese… there can be bad judging (we’ve all seen superstar treatment, home-field calls and bad reffing in the NBA) without it being cheating. Also, while the gymnasts certainly appear to be under 16, I haven’t seen anything I’d call proof yet.

Boomshakalaka

by jksnake99 on Aug 24, 2008 12:56 PM PDT up reply actions 0 recs

Australia, Hands Down

They took 46 total medal, yet have less than 20 million people. 14 golds, 15 silvers, 17 bronze. Finished 1 back of Great Britain (61 million people). Outperformed Germany(83 million), Italy(58 million) , France(64 million), Japan(123 million), Brazil(191 million), etc.

The US’s 110 medals (300 million people), China’s 100 medals (1.3 billion), and Russia’s 72 medals (140 million people) don’t even compare to what the Aussies did.

If we were as productive on a percapita basis as the Aussies, we’d have pulled 1665 medals – meaning all of them plus some.

You have to wonder what kind of Wheaties the Aussies have for breakfast.

by Eben Calder on Aug 24, 2008 12:53 PM PDT reply actions 0 recs

kinda a fun statistical/measurement theory question

In saying that Australia was most impressive, you are saying a couple of things. One, you are saying that population confers an advantage for a nation in winning gold medals. Two, you are making an assumption on the functional form of that advantage… you are assuming that it confers a multiplicative advantage.

Mathematically, if we look at raw medals we are essentially estimating an equation of the following form:

medals = Olympic success

If we look at medals per capita we are saying, wait, more populous countries have an unfair advantage. I want to know the country effect controlling for population. We could control for population in a number of ways, but doing it by percapita implies the following:

medals/population=Olympic success

Doing some algebra, that is the same as:

Medals=population * Olympic success

I would argue, however, that small countries are systematically advantaged with that relationship. This is actually a testable hypothesis. It’s possible that the “true” advantage conferred by population is different. It could be any of the following

Medals=a*population+Olympic success
Medals=a*population+b*population^2 + Olympic success
Medals=a*population + b*population*Olympic success
etc

Where a and b are constants (and could be positive or negative).

Of course, if population provides an advantage, so might GDP, home field, etc. As it turns out, those things do provide an advantage:

http://blogs.wsj.com/economics/2008/08/08/want-to-predict-olympic-champs-look-at-gdp-2/

In conclusion, the Olympics are fun to watch!

by PoliSam on Aug 24, 2008 1:57 PM PDT up reply actions 1 recs