August 12, 2024

Gold Medals - Paris 2024

The Olympic games were a bit of a flop, but let's play one of those rank the countries differently games. The USA media rank countries by the total number of medals won. They do this to prevent their own country being shown, potentially, lower than first place. 

The accepted way of ranking is to do so by golds first, then silver, then bronze. Thus, Italy came ninth and Germany tenth. Italy received 12 golds, 13 silver, and 15 bronze, while Germany were 12 golds, 13 silver and eight bronze. 

In using this system, New Zealand came eleventh with ten golds, wedged between Germany and Canada below with its nine gold medals. To put this in context, NZ has 5 million people, while Germany has 84 million and Canada 39 million.

NZ's gold medal count amounts to 50% of all its medals. Is this the best country using that measure? No, it isn't, if we look at the list of countries, ranking them by percentage of total medals that are gold gives the following result:

1= Pakistan and Dominica (100%)

2= Algeria and Indonesia (66.6%)

3. Uzbekistan (61.5%)

4= Norway, Hong Kong, Philippines, Botswana, Morocco, New Zealand, Guatemala, Uganda, Saint Lucia, Chile (50%)

However, if we look at these countries and ask how many medals in total did they win, then NZ takes top spot as it won 20 medals, with Uzbekistan second with its 13 medals.

Countries that underperformed were the likes of Brazil and Poland. When you consider that Brazil hosted the Olympics as recently as 2016, they've really fallen away. Clearly, the games are not a priority for them.

The per capita method of ranking is often used, and this skews the result to small countries. For instance, Grenada comes first using this method, even though they did not win a gold. I'd rank per capita by gold only, then Dominica would be first, Saint Lucia second, but NZ would be high on that list too with one gold for every 500,000 people.

Anyway, I play around with this sort of thing as the games are a complete rort. I used to think the USSR rigging everything was bad, but now with the USA in the ascendency, they're even worse. I say, get rid of all events where judges decide the score. And stop skewing the distribution of medals. You don't see athletics having races for running backwards, hopping on two legs and then hopping on one - do you? OK, they have the race walks and triple jump, but generally it is run from A to B, first one there wins. Swimming has so many events, then they have mixtures of these events, then relays. This is done to pad the medal count. Stop doing that, it is annoying, simply race and the first to arrive wins, and who cares what swimming methods they use.

I'd also scrap most of the field events and replace them. The exception would be pole vault, I'd keep that. But new events I'd introduce: basketball goal shooting, and then accuracy ball throwing, using a hybrid baseball/cricket ball. How about a form of hybrid soccer/rugby ball goal kicking. People would get interested in events like that. We've seen rock climbing and skateboarding really taking off, the games have to evolve. 

And when we think about the old field events, they've banned so many ways of doing things that we know result in better performances; gone is the somersault long jump, the spinning javelin, cartwheel shotput and the high jumpers don't tumble. With the latter event, the Fosbury Flop is mostly used, but that doesn't gain maximum height, tumbling does. 

Oh, and Parkour would get people interested in the Olympics again, add that to the field events too.


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