On medal tables

Aug 19, 2008 at 2:32 PM
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Great Britain is doing unexpectedly well at the Olympics, which is a pleasant surprise. The BBC has us at third in the medal table. But are we?

The BBC, like many news outlets, displays the medal table sorted by number of gold medals won (with silver and bronze counts breaking ties). But in the US, NBC ranks countries by total medals won. Now, coincidentally, this ranks the US higher than China. I suspected foul play, but some digging shows that they did this back in 2004 as well, when they out scored Russia and China in both golds and total medals.

A little Perl hackery, and the data culled from the BBC News site today, yields the following tables, ranking countries by total golds, total medals, and two "points" rankings - one with gold worth 3, silver 2, and bronze 1, and the other with 5, 3, and 1 point values.

What does this prove? Not much, really. But it's fun to play with the numbers. I originally wrote the WebService::CIA Perl module to extract population data to work out a medals-per-capita ranking for the 2000 Summer Olympics. blech (and the Today programme) suggested to me that GDP and/or GDP-per-capita might be interesting parameters too. Maybe later.

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blech, true to his word, provided me with per-capita and GDP-based graphics, (the latter a real triumph of art over information display).

On medal tables

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