Olympic medal table controversy explained

A controversy is emerging at this year’s Olympics. No, it’s not a widespread doping operation, not anything to do with corrupt and questionable judging or officiating or matchfixing. Even the waters of the Seine have seemed to hold up well without any of the competitors turning into Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. At least not yet. We are talking about the controversy of the medal table.

Yes, the medal table.

Namely… how exactly is this thing supposed to work?

Depending on where you are in the world, or what media platform you follow, what the medal table displays can be very different. Here are a few different options that we’ve seen just in the first few days of the 2024 Paris Olympics .

Total Medals

This method seems to be the favorite of American broadcaster NBC. And naturally, the United States is already out to an enormous lead in the total medals department with 20 as of July 30th. France comes in second as the host nation with 16. However, most of the USA medals thus far have been in bronze or silver.

Other American media outlets like ESPN and the New York Times are also going with total medals.

Gold Medals First

Other outlets around the world favor going with gold medals first, followed by silver and bronze as tiebreakers. This is used by the BBC who put China at first with 7 gold medals in this chart tied with Japan, but leading in silver medals to put them in first place. The United States ends up not even in the picture.

This method seems to be the preferred medal table for the international community. Marca (Spain), L’equipe (France), Fox Sports (Australia), and SuperSport (South Africa) are just a few of many that use this method. And if you’re looking to give the gold medal route more credence, it’s also used on the Olympics website .

Case closed, right? Not really. According to NBC, the Olympics doesn’t actually give any official designation on how to properly sort the medal table. So let’s have some more fun, shall we!

Making Up The Medal Table As We Go Along

If there aren’t any official ways to do medal tables, then why not explore all the boundaries of what is possible? Some of the best medal tables are the ones that aren’t bound by any kind of rules and regulations. If Euronews wants to combine all the EU medals into one pool so that they can be number one, then let it be done.

Then there is… whatever this viral image is from Bleacher Report which must be sorted by a random number generator?

The New York Times Way-Too Complicated Medal Table Route

Then of course there’s the New York Times, which has gifted us a “ Choose Your Own Adventure ” route where you can actually weight anything between all medals being equal and gold, silver, and bronze being a 20x multiple of the next descending medal.

While you can rank the USA anywhere from first to sixth place in the medal table, it gets really fun down the lineup. Brazil can go anywhere from 11th to 28th (!!!)

Common Sense Medal Table Alternatives

If none of those are satisfactory, there’s even more options that would meet in the middle and seem to be about as fair as you can get. One would be a 3-2-1 weighting system for gold, silver, and bronze. Another would be a per capita or per athlete system that would measure the number of medals per person or per competitor at the Olympics. It’s not quite fair to compare the medal count of the United States (594 athletes) or France (572) to Jamaica (63) or Estonia (24) after all.

So what’s the best way to sort medal tables? Honestly, it’s probably whatever makes your country look the best at any particular moment. And for America, if that means total medals right now and gold medals a couple weeks from now, then so be it. After all, that kind of American exceptionalism in choosing our own weights and measures was Washington’s dream.

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