Monday, March 1, 2010

On Olympic Medal Counts

I've seen a few stories this morning pointing to the US as having "won" the 2010 Olympic Winter Games "Medal Count", and I have to admit to being a bit put off by this. In no other sporting event that I am aware of is losing (and by that, I mean not winning) afforded as much credit as in the Olympics. Here's what I mean.

As I scan the "medal standings this morning, I see the following:

Country Gold Silver Bronze Total
US 9 15 13 37
Germany 10 13 7 30
Canada 14 7 5 26

So there you have it. US wins. USA! USA! USA!

But wait a second--we "win" because we "lost" more often. Presumably, we didn't lose by as much as Germany or Canada--but then again, we're not looking at medals as a percentage of events entered. We're looking at total medals--a count that assigns third place a value equal to coming in first place. This seems inappropriate to me.

Yes, yes. I know. It's all about the competition, the Olympic ideal, the stories behind the medals. And gosh darn it, a Silver's quite an accomplishment! Yes it is. So is losing the Super Bowl. So is losing the World Series. But at the heart of that status is a LOSS, and society rightly views it that way.

So if we're going to have a "medal count", I would advocate that it track only golds. But if honor must be paid to those who lost, why not "weight" the count, assigning 3 points to a gold, 2 to a silver and 1 to a bronze? Using this math, the order of merit would be: US (70) Germany (63) and Canada (61). This doesn't change the order of outcome in this year's games, but it does afford additional weight to actually WINNING events.

2 comments:

"The Hammer" said...

Good hockey game as best I could judge. Rednecks don't play that many winter sports so we usually confine ourselves to lewd comments about the figure skaters (both male and female). However the Canadians looked the better team all day.
By the by, who won the curling?

arame said...

If you take out the "judged" sports and only count the ones that are timed or scored, I believe we lose.

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