Weekend Stuff: Weighting the Olympic Medals

I read a couple of snide comments about NBC and other US media listing countries by total number of medals not by the number of Gold medals - with the US showing on top.

So I weighted the medals as follows - Gold 2 points, Silver 1.5 and Bronze 1, and in another column I weighted Gold as 3, Silver as 2 and Bronze as 1 (click on table to see larger image)

Japan would break the top 10 displacing Ukraine in both weighted scenarios.

In Scenario 2, US still comes up on top. In Scenario 3, China slightly pips the US. Of course, there is the Scenario 1 - the unweighted medal count.

Since the US comes out ahead in 2 out of 3 scenarios, can we settle the matter?

Having said that, China surpassed expectations both in the medals - and of course the logistics, the ceremonies etc. In so many ways, it was a coming out party for China.

Update: The International Olympics Committee uses Gold medals as the sorting criterion.

Comments

[Chris Yeh]

I also want to do an analysis of performance in judged vs. non-judged events. It's pretty clear who won a 100-meter dash. Not so much with things like gymnastics and diving, where judges have admitted they're pretty much guessing.

[Devan]

Vinnie, Good breakdown, but I'd like to see number of medals won as a percentage of the number of athletes competing for that country. :)

By the way, have you checked out Zoho's live Olympic dashboard which was done using their online tools? Pretty much lets you churn out stats reports on your own custom criteria...

http://olympics2008.wiki.zoho.com/

[vinnie mirchandani]

Devan, the Zoho analysis is cool - and I say that without bias (they are a sponsor if this blog).

To your question here is the yield per athlete..any medal (gold or silver or bronze). I got number of athletes from WikiAnswers - hopefully it is close to what actually participated - some withdrew for various reasons

http://wiki.answers.com/Q/How_many_athletes_per_country_are_competing_in_the_2008_Summer_Olympics

USA 17.03%
China 17.27%
Russia 17.10%
Great Britain 14.37%
Australia 10.09%
Germany 8.74%
France 11.98%
South Korea 11.23%
Italy 8.51%
Ukraine 10.59%
Japan 7.12%

[Dermot]

Vinnie

I'm not sure what the state of play in the US is but everywhere else in the world uses the number of Golds as the ranking criteria. On that basis China wins. Your other criteria of weighted average of 3, 2 and 1 points makes a little sense China wins again. The other Criteria I'm not so sure of (and this from Ireland with no golds 1 silver and 2 bronze).

Dermot

[vinnie mirchandani]

Dermot, we refuse to accept metric in the US :)

I did update note to say the IOC uses Gold medals as the sorting criterion.

In 2004 China had fewer total medals than Russia, but more Gold so was placed second