Rank Country Gold Silver Bronze Total
1 United States 7 7 8 22
2 China 13 3 4 20
3 South Korea 5 6 1 12
4 Australia 3 2 5 10
5t Italy 3 4 2 9
5t Russia 2 4 3 9
5t France 0 7 2 9
8 North Korea 1 2 4 7
9t Germany 4 1 1 6
9t Japan 3 1 2 6
9t Britain 2 1 3 6
Chess Daily News from Susan Polgar
The order is wrong: China has more gold medals than the US. Remember that the number order is determined by the number of gold medals (then by silver medals, and finally bronze medals), not by the total number of medals.
Here’s the official list:
http://results.beijing2008.cn/WRM/ENG/INF/GL/95A/GL0000000.shtml
USA All The Way
Yes, typically you would count the gold medals first. Of course, that would be hard on the French right now: 7 silver, 2 bronze, but no gold…
This is the only way to put US in front 🙂
US should win the overall total count but China will most likely win the gold count.
The USA needs to be number one here it is a matter of honor and will effect the self esteem of all US citizens and respect when travelling abroad. Winning the most medals in the Olympics is a matter of the highest importance for national security and will determine who is who and what is what. The success of East Germany and the Soviet Union were built on a solid Olympic foundation that needs to be fortified with national programs and expenditures in the USA.
Great fou USA but bad for France wih Laure Manaudou 🙁
Philippe from Paris
Webmaster de Chess & Strategy: http://www.chess-and-strategy.com/
The medal count has ALWAYS been presented in a way that the nations are ordered by number of gold medals, then silver and then bronze.
And I’m sure that if it would be the other way around, then the American media (I’m not blaming Susan, because she probably copied the list from somewhere) would present the list in proper way – by number of gold medals.
Face it, China is developing very fast and will be the leading force, in sports and otherwise. Some day in the future when India will wake up, there will hardly be anything left for others 😉
And where is East Germany and the Soviet Union? just a question.
China may have more gold medals right now, but the U.S. has a hotter women’s gymnastics team.
I hope you mean that their body temperature is higher than those by Chinese athlets
OR
that you are about 15 years old.
Otherwise you are a pedophile.
Wait until the track & field events start – US should catch China in the Gold count (and overall).
Anonymous 4:08: “East Germany” joined with Germany in 1990. The Soviet Union has not existed since 1991.
You really should brush up on your history.
“I hope you mean that […] Otherwise you are a pedophile.”
The minimum age of female gymnasts is 16, and that is the legal age of consent in most (U.S.) states. In any case, from a biological standpoint I don’t think you can categorize physical interest in a 16-year-old to be pedophilia.
If you’re saying that some of the Chinese gymnasts suspiciously look younger than 16, yeah, you have a point.
“In any case, from a biological standpoint I don’t think you can categorize physical interest in a 16-year-old to be pedophilia.”
OK SPAM SLOAN, take you and your pedophilic proclivities to a different blog…like camel-lover.com… talk about a human freak-show…
In the US, the medal count has ALWAYS been presented in order of total medals. My earliest such memory is the Bergen County Record newspaper from 1972. That’s why it’s called a “medal count”.
As I write, it’s
USA 10-8-9 (27)
CHN 14-3-5 (22)
Under the 3-2-1 weighting, this totals
USA 55, China 53.
But under the 5-3-1 weighting, which is preferred in many quarters, it’s
USA 83, China 84!
China actually adopted a policy called “Project 119” to concentrate on relatively few sports that had a lot of separate medal events. As SI says, “One-one-nine refers to the number of golds given out at the 2000 Games in the medal-rich sports of track and field, swimming, rowing, sailing and canoe/kayak. In Sydney, China won only one medal, total, in those sports.” Compare basketball or the decathlon, requiring either a big team or many separate efforts—but they have only 1 medal.
So maybe a “real” medal evaluation should take into account the difficulty and preparation time for the events. Or the worldwide “buzz” factor. Throw in a country’s population as a weighting factor too—then France looks better, but Jamaica looks really good! Throw in lots of other factors…and then you’re close to the simplicity and clarity of what I’ve been doing with chess this summer, right now applying Simpson’s Rule to integrate line elements I got out of a general-relativity textbook :-). Then I’ll finally have enough groundwork to ask the really important statistical questions…
“*THE* order number is ALWAYS determined by the number of gold medals”?!
Nonsense! Look at Susan’s webpage, where countries are listed in order of medal totals. Or look at CBS Sportsline, or CNN or newspapers from 30 years ago…all are listed in terms of total medals. Sometimes people list them in order of golds, sometimes in order of total medals, sometimes in a “point” order (a la K. W. Regan).
It is internationally accepted to give the medal count by number of gold, silver and bronze, and NOT by total number of medals (I think it is even writen in some rules of the IOC).
American’s only set up and follow the international agreements (AND demand from others to follow them) when it fits them. When it doesn’t, they don’t give a damn about international organizations.
And then they wonder why so many people don’t like them 🙂
Not just the USA. Here’s an official Canadian Broadcasting Company (CBC) page that lists Hungary 5th (in the 1972 Olympics) with 35 medals, whereas Wikipedia’s page “follows the system used by the IOC, IAAF, and BBC” with Japan, Australia, and Poland having more golds.
There also seems to be a distinction between “medal table” and “medal count”. My point is, the latter term means counting all medals equally, a 1-1-1 weighting. And the practice is cultural, not US-specific, and goes back a long way—it’s not propagandistic. To fix the problem in the North American press, China simply needs to learn how to be more mediocre, that’s all :-).
Now I can explain my chess issue using the medal-weighting analogy. My data shows that the quality of play drops off markedly when the player to move is more than 1.5 pawns ahead or more than 1 pawn behind, as evaluated by chess engines. Is this a real human effect (cockiness and demoralization, or play-it-safe and risk-taking?), or is it an “effect of scale”? The latter means asking, when the position itself is unbalanced, does a tenth-of-a-pawn difference matter less than when it is even—and if so, does the scale account for all of the discrepancy?
To model this, I have to put weights on the tenth-of-a-pawn differential (or really the hundreth-of-a-pawn unit that chess engines use), so it becomes a problem of metrics in differential calculus. Take advantages of 0.00, 1.00, and 2.00 as pole marks. If a tenth of a pawn matters only half as much when you’re 1 pawn ahead, and a third as much when you’re 2 pawns ahead, then the metric has a 1-2-3 weighting at these points, or rather 1-1/2-1/3. A sharper “curving” of the scale would be a 1-1/3-1/5 metric, i.e. a tenth of a pawn mattering five times less when you’re 2 pawns ahead or behind. My raw data is on the 1-1-1 metric, counting all cases equally. Einstein showed that our feet stick to the ground because space doesn’t use a “1-1-1” metric.
The metric I believe to be most relevant scales by doubling, giving a differential weight of 1/log(e) where e is the overall evaluation. To re-scale the engine’s reported values of the various moves, I have to do a “line-element integral” of this function. Alas, the integral is known not to have a simple formula—it’s the famous “Li(x)” function from prime number theory and the Riemann Hypothesis—so I have to approximate it. Alas the simple approximation formulas such as e/log(e) would work only when e is big, whereas most chess positions are close to even (i.e. |e| near zero), so I have to roll-up-my-(computer’s)-sleeves and use a painstaking rule like Simpson’s.
“where is soviet union”?
count all the medals for russia, ukraine, estonia, lithuania, armenia, belarus, kazakhstan, uzbekistan, … and you get your soviet union right back and kicking!
its the same thing if say all but texas, new mexico and california would break off of united states. then suddenly phelps would represent some Maryland, that nobody really knows where it is or who its president is, or whether they even have one…
then you could ask oh, and where is u.s.a?
because in the end, its all about just two things – lots of people or lots of money. or both…
with them, you win olympics.
Simpson’s rule, almost as good as Simpson’s Divan. The null prime derivative of Planck’s Constant factorial.
d’Oh!
When computer chess-playing programs were very weak, it was tempting to sacrifice material against them. Rather than give the material back to emerge with positional superiority, a la Larry Evans, they would often think that the second or third pawn were *more* important than the one you’d already given them. Only to realize too late that the computer’s king was catastrophically weak.
Aaaah, the good old days. D’ohnuts.
–JB
The International Olympic “Committee (IOC) does not recognise global ranking per country; the medal tables are displayed for information only.
Furthermore, the results that we publish are official and are taken from the “Official Report” – a document published for each Olympic Games by the Organising Committee. However, for the first Olympic Games (until Antwerp in 1920), it is difficult to give the exact number of medals awarded to some countries, due to the fact that teams were composed of athletes from different countries.
The medal tables by country are based on the number of medals won, with gold medals taking priority over silver and bronze. A team victory counts as one medal.”
From the IOC website.I think this is enough to solve the “polemic”.