Great Britain 4th on Medal table?

That's nothing, the Australians were ordering the table by silvers earlier in the week... A couple of Russian wrestlers have lost this morning so GB have been confirmed 3rd on the official Olympic Medal Table.

That is the table of medals.

You must be getting confused with the table of gold medals?

There is only one medal table, and until 4 years ago it was always ranked by number of golds. Bbecause China got more gold medals than the USA 4 years ago, then the Americans change it to rank by total number of medals!

China are a better Olympic nation than the USA now anyway. USA just happen to be good at two of the three sports where there are a shedload of medals available, China seem to be consistently good across the majority of sports.

to be fair I read that the US has always ranked by the number of medals but it has only come to notice in the past couple of games when it significantly changed the order

GB 3rd in the proper table,the yanks still think they won the vietnam war so you can hardly expect them to get a medal table right.

Funny because in 1996 I remember Englanders wanting the Medal Table as done by the Yanks

It should be ordered based on overall medals divided by population ...

There is only one medal table


No there are loads of them, you just order it by whichever way makes your country look stronger (Politically motivated)

So in Ireland's case,turn it upside down and divide by 10.

In 1996, we didn't want a medal table.

So in Ireland's case,turn it upside down and divide by 10.


No its the Per Capita Medals table, which puts us ever so slightly behind Britain

Well behind GB even on that.

Per capita is a non sensical measure unless only looking at individual events.

Will heavily favour larger nations otherwise.

Doesn't favour larger nations when events are limited to one and three competitors per nation, if anything it skews medal opportunities towards smaller and weaker nations. Were all the events fully open the biggest countries would greatly increase their medal tallies and smaller nations would decrease.

Well behind GB even on that.

all medals not just gold

Oh, so you're using an approach where gold has no greater value than silver or bronze, I see.

sure what other way is there

Points system with values assigned to the different medals- say 4-2-1- a silver worth two bronzes, a gold worth two silvers...

Semenya apart, they're all going for gold out there. Any system that doesn't value gold more favourably is pointless. Would you prefer to have won 50 bronzes or 50 golds? Nothing wrong with silver and bronze, but they're what you go for when the gold is gone...

Per Capita wouldn't really work
Someone like Grenada is nailed on the moment it gets a gold
In fact we would need 600 golds to beat Grenada's current ratio

Perhaps you could do it dividing by GDP, calculating a co-efficient of natural genetic predisposition for individual sports and dividing this by a stochastic t-score of the level of care anyone has for this purile non-debate