Is it me or is the Beijing 2008 Olympics Medal Table being “Americanized”?
Ok, I became a US citizen last week and there is a danger, amidst all of the patriotic outpouring that is the citizenship ceremony, and the frenzy of Phelps generated nationalism, that in response I am over-compensating. In other words I may be seeing devils where there are none.
However, what I am about to show you seems, on the face of it, a cheap attempt to make the US Olympic effort seem better than that of the host country, China.
Here is the official medal table from the Olympic Committee’s official web site:
Now, look at the NBC version of the table:
Wow – the US is first 
To be sure I checked out the BBC’s site. Here is its version:
So…. why do all US based Olympic medal tables deviate from the official version, whilst the rest of the world does not? Could it be that the only way to get the US in first position is to add Gold, Silver and Bronze into a total and then order the results by total medals won, implying that all medals are equal?
Or to put it another way – let’s assume you applied this methodology to a single event, oh I don’t know, let’s say… swimming (ludicrous I know, but it makes the point) – that would mean that the silver and bronze medal winners in Phelps events are counted equally to him, and so a person who won 1 gold, 3 silvers and 7 bronzes (11 medals in total) would be a bigger winner than Phelps.
Makes no sense does it
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Tags: 2008 olympics, beijing 2008 olympics, bronze medal winners, citizenship ceremony, olympic medal, olympics medal table
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On February 6, 2010
It’s you.
Just kidding.
This is a very very long debate which goes far beyond my country is better than yours.
Officially, the IOC is forbidden to release medal tables by their charter. There is no OFFICIAL version from the IOC. They’ve been ‘unofficially’ releasing them since about 1992, and then in the ‘gold first’ standard. Some smaller countries like gold first as they can get just 1 gold and move quite far up the table, ahead of a country that has say 3 silvers and 7 bronzes. Others hate gold first as it is being used as an excuse to cut funding for non-gold possible sports.
I blogged about it yesterday here and you should also read the WSJ piece on this (the link is in my post–don’t want to post two links as that will spam catch this comment)
http://penguinsix.com/2008/08/18/the-olympic-medal-table-race-more-golds-or-more-medals/