The traditional medal tally lists countries in order of the most gold medals (with the silver used to rank when the gold is equal, and then the bronze). Other medal tallies get more Olympic-spirited and list nations in order of the total number of medals won, irrespective of their colour.
Other medal tallies get more Olympic-spirited and list nations in order of number of medals won, irrespective of their colour. It is as important to compete (and come second or third) as to win gold.
There is, however, surprisingly little difference in the order of nations between these three sorts of tallies. The top nine countries stay in the same order either way.
Other people have suggested “”fairer” ways of working out who “”won” the Games. Why should big, rich America be seen as the winner, they argue.
MedalTally Pty Ltd runs the website MedalTally.com. It has a couple of interesting medals per million tables. It works out how many medals were won per million population. It also does a gold medals per million.
The result is very different from the official list. Australia is an exception, sitting fourth and fifth on each of these tables, almost identical with the raw list. But the big-population countries do much worse. The United States drops from first on the absolute medal count to 48th on the table of medals per million people. Russia drops from second to 32nd. On the other hand, Bahamas moves from 52nd to first, with more medals per million population than any other country on earth. Barbados, with just one bronze and a total population about the same as Canberra’s comes second.
But is population the only adjustment to be made to get a fair view of who won the Olympics. Some countries are rich with plenty of spare money for its people to spend on sport. The US has $34,000 per head per year; Cuba just $1700.
Geoff Francis, of Riverstone, has e-mailed media outlets with his own table. It assigns points for population and gross domestic product per capital. The more people and money the fewer the points. He also awarded weighted points for the medals according to whether they were gold, silver and bronze. He multiplied the points with the medals and came up with a new table. It puts Russia first, followed by Australia, China and the US.
On both the raw tally and most of these adjusted accounts, Australia does fairly well – up there in the top five or better.
But there is another factor – the amount of government and other spending on the training of elite athletes. This is very hard to measure, but Australia’s must be very high on world standards, particularly in this Olympiad with the Games being held in Australia.
We spend buckets of money. Just before the Games began, Acting Prime Minister John Anderson in a answer to a Dorthoy Dixer in Parliament rattled off $600 million in federal spending on elite sport.
There is no guarantee that money and effort will always give a better result, but the likelihood is that it will. East Germany poured millions into the Olympics as did other Eastern Bloc countries for political reasons. It was a way of saying communism gets results (even if they had to achieve it in a capitalist way by spending lots of money to win in a competitive environment). This Olympics, China came third on the raw count with 59 medals (and a very high proportion of gold). India with a similar population and GDP to China’s came 74th with just one bronze medal. The difference is not population or GDP, but money and effort specifically directed to the task at hand – getting Olympic medals.
So let’s allow for that. Let’s also allow for the home-town advantage. The result is that Australia does not have any more or less “”natural” sporting ability than anyone else. Indeed, recent National Health and Welfare Institute figures suggest we are getting fatter and lazier. Perhaps the more you spend on elite sport, the more the masses watch (rather than do) those sports and the more remote they seem from you taking part.
If we make enough allowances for national attributes (coping with floods, political corruption, climate, prevalence of disease and so on) surely we must end up with a medal tally where all nations are equal. But most of the differences in the raw table must be due to the money and effort nations and individuals put in. This should be encouraging for Australia. It should tell us that if it applies to sport it can apply to other things.