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Friday 22 August 2008

Olympic Games Medal Count

I'm not a big fan of the Olympic Games, or maybe it's just that I don't care. I don't think I even followed what was going on -- except when reading some newspaper at the airport. But a friend of mine got annoyed that France wasn't really well-positioned in the medal count: we're currently ranked 11th or 7th, depending how you count things.

However, getting annoyed can lead to amusing results. He took the official results and made a script to compute the medal count for the European Union. And guess what? We're first, and with a large gap between the EU and the second country. Go see the true medal count :-)

[16:16] | [Web] | [#487]

Comments

1. Richard Van Den Boom [22/08/2008@16:47]

A better rank system would be to count the amount of medals divided by the number of participants involved by the country (or its population) : Europe may have 2.5 more medals than the US, but how many more participants, since each european countries sent probably quite a few people?

2. Victor Bogado [22/08/2008@16:58]

Richard, the US has a very, very big participation also.

3. Vincent [22/08/2008@17:00]

Richard: sure, it could be done this way. I'm pretty sure it's possible to tweak things for the top 3 or 4 countries so that each one of them is first with some method. Which simply means that it's useless to look at those medal counts ;-)

4. Alex [22/08/2008@17:06]

I assume it uses simple sums. But if it would be EU then you have to compute it differently, taking into account that there would be only one team competing in every discipline, i.e. you cant take more then one medal in team-sport-like discipline (waterpolo, relays). And a max count per discipline would be 1 gold + 1 silver + 1 bronze, if you understand what I am talking about ;)

5. Julian [22/08/2008@17:23]

@Richard according to these statistics
www.idsia.ch/~juergen/med...
www.idsia.ch/~juergen/all...

The EU has the highest gold medal count per capita

6. Vadim [22/08/2008@17:52]

Go Russia! ;)

7. LinuxTX [22/08/2008@18:05]

EU is not a country, so the "true medal count" is useless.
Maybe the Americas should add all of their medals together or maybe all of Asia.

Do you consider yourself a citizen of the EU instead of a citizen of France?

8. Vincent [22/08/2008@18:20]

LinuxTX: I'm a citizen of France and of EU. Sure, EU is not a country (yet, some people might say). However, you could compare all this to the CIS that competed as one team in 1992 (see en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uni...).

Also, you're confusing European Union and Europe when you compare EU to Americas and Asia.

9. Brad [22/08/2008@18:25]

Too bad each of the states in America can't field their own teams (like each country in the EU).

More appropriate might be to pull in population data, and do medals per capita. Still might not be fair; it seems like that would actually favor smaller countries.

10. Ante Karamatic [22/08/2008@19:08]

Guys are right. For example, in table tennis, each country could send 3 athletes. This means 3 from USA, but 3x27 (81) from EU. Those kind of rules exist in each competition.

11. Constantine [22/08/2008@19:48]

gogo eu :)
Prbbly we support first our own country but Europe is something more than just a geographic area like e.g Asia or America.

12. Julian [22/08/2008@19:56]

fyi there is something called European citizenship.

"Citizenship of the European Union was introduced by the Maastricht Treaty signed in 1992. It exists alongside national citizenship and provides additional rights to nationals of European Union Member States."

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eur...

13. sb [22/08/2008@20:04]

Well done. I'm always glad to see people taking pride in the fact that they are citizens of the European Union. In spite of all of its problems, the E.U. is a great project and a beautiful idea.

14. claudio [23/08/2008@00:43]

As I know Vincent, I know he is not seriou at all.

Otherwise I'd object in the same way almost everyone upthere already did.

Stop with that icecream, dude :-)

15. Bruce Cowan [23/08/2008@01:13]

There's something wrong with the medal count if us from Britain are 3rd. That's just weird.

16. DMAB [23/08/2008@12:22]

For those of you interested in comparing medal count per continent, there is one available on www.eumedalcount.eu -- and Europe is first... :-)

17. Simon [24/08/2008@13:11]

Is grouping all the EU countries together really meaningful? Remember that many events allow only a single entrant (individual or team) per nation - the EU as a whole could enter only a single rower in the men's 2km, for example. So if you're going to sum them up, you'd in many cases have to disallow any cases where more than one EU nation ended up on the dais...

18. James Henstridge [25/08/2008@04:29]

If you assume that potential gold medal winners are uniformly distributed among the world's population, then large population countries (China, Russia, USA, etc) will be more likely to have more gold medal winners.

This has an even larger effect when it comes to team sports. It isn't enough to have a single brilliant athlete: you need a whole team of them. In this case, Europe as separate countries is at a disadvantage compared to Europe as a single country since their best athletes may be spread over many mediocre teams instead of a single team with only the best.

19. Sparky Spark [02/09/2008@16:30]

The medal count simply shows which country truly dominate the Games, fairness doesn't have to do anything with it. During the games, everybody were fair, including the judges, rules, and athlete themselves. So you can't reinterpret the simplest result (Gold, Silver, Bronze) per country (it's actually called NOC, which each country had their canditature determined with the IOC up to a hundred years ago), into ridiculous statistics of all sorts. Unless it's for your own enjoyment; it can't be official.

20. Vincent2 [02/09/2008@16:44]

Each person want the best profit for themselves, their family, their country. In the end, we are all just selfish bastards who try to make the best out of anything profitable no matter how ridiculous the results will look like.

That's why it exists a medium for each competitive events or tournaments. And for the Olympics, it's called the IOC.

The resulting medal count given by the IOC is the only official result; and this year, it showed that China has clearly dominated the games, other countries can complain, but you cannot deny the true winner. Countries that has a chance for the first spot (Russia, US, Germany, Australia, Japan, etc.) should just work harder for the next olympics.

This years winner is China, complaining after the results won't change anything ;).

21. video [01/12/2008@06:16]

It is true that technically the EU could be collected (as the U.S.) which will mount the scores !

22. Euroskeptic [15/02/2009@21:18]

Ahh, the classic EU stupidity. Here is the rub. Part of the reason the EU does well because as separate countries it allows for much greater participation then the Olympics allows to a single country. For example, the US is only allowed typically 3 or 4 athletes to qualify at the national level. However, the UK has 3, France has tree, Germany has three, etc. If you were to actually compete as the EU, you would have to live by those restriction which would drop the medal count considerably.

This is the same reason why the EU should not have a seperate seat at the UN, unless it is at the cost of the UK and France's seats.

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Friday 22 August 2008

Olympic Games Medal Count

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by Vincent