Which in your opinion is the correct way to order the olympic medals table. By number of GOLD medals won, which puts China ahead of the USA, or by TOTAL medals won, which puts the USA ahead of China.
It's always been done by Gold medals, presumably because those basically show who won in each event. The totals is just a statistical thing, coming 2nd or 3rd just means you nearly won. On a side note has anyone noticed that Britain seems to be good at any sport that involves sitting down?
Thats what I would have thought. It just seems that most american news services are bucking the trend and running the medal table in total medals order, which just happens to put them top.
If it was the other way round they'd be running it by number of gold medals. I guess Americans like to hear they're doing great and America is on top. No big surprise really, I suspect most countries would do it.
Team GB has done so well in cycling due to the high cost of fuel Shamelessly plagirised from the BBC sport website!
It looks like you got us this year though, whichever way you look at it. Looks like the big investment into your sports has paid off, wish our gov would wake up and stop advertising ways to get fit, and start providing them. I heard that what GB spend on their paraolympic swim team is more than what AUS spends on their entire swim team.
Cumulative funding over the years and decades up to now is surely greater for Australia though. I don't think this is a turning point, Australia will always be better than us at sport.
I reckon it should be done on total number of medals, maybe with something like: 3 points for a gold 2 points for a silver 1 point for a bronze Then see who gets the highest total.
i've been thinking that points should be awarded for medals, and bonus points for WR/OR is a good idea too. if nations are tied on points then the amount of gold medals won would be used to decide. this way the olympics would become a team effort rather than individual.
I can't see how you can really rank it any other way. Silver and bronze are just 1st and 2nd loser after all!
I didn't mean it in a poor us, we have no money to spend on sport way (I think we have a $14 billion surplus or something). I was saying that it is good to see a government getting behind it's sporting teams. I think it is an undervalued area that the Australian government takes for granted. What GB has done is awesome. On top of the increased national pride from the way they have done this year, there is going to be an awesome follow on effect felt for years to come. All the kids that now have a drive to do sports will result in less of a strain on the health system, not just this generation, but the kids they then involve in sports. Don't get me wrong it sucks for us, too many almosts to count, but that is not the way I intended it to come across.
My personal thought was that It should be: 5 points for gold 3 points for silver 1 point for bronze Just seemed to give a slightly higher weighting towards the gold medal.
That would work. I didn't give mine loads of thought - just something I quickly thought of while reading the thread.
Why stop at 3rd place? You may as well have points starting at 1 point for last place and incrementing up to 1st! The point is who wins the event, not who did well. While placing 2nd or 3rd is definitely a great achievement and worthwhile rewarding, the olympic table should be based on which countries won the events.
I disagree. If country X won 25 silvers and 15 bronzes but not a gold, whilst country Y won a single medal that was gold, then country Y did better?
Nope, country X didn't win any events. It may have done well but Y actually won something, even if it didn't have any runner up prizes. I think more developed countries have lost a lot of what it means to win an event by celebrating the guys who didn't quite make it. Look at Tan Zongliang who apologized for getting Bronze, in the UK it's a success story but in China it just meant he didn't win, even if he was close to winning.
