The Olympic Medal Count

I’m sure that I’ve probably made some comment on this about four years ago, but I can’t be bothered going back to check out whether I did or not. So here it is. The Australian media were basically a bunch of bastards until we started to win a couple more than that first relay gold medal.

There was a lot made about the fact that as a nation we’d had high expectations that weren’t being lived up to. In reality we only had that expectation because some athletes and certainly the media beat it all up ahead of the games. So we didn’t win all the gold medals that we expected. Personally I think even fourth or fifth in the world is a remarkable achievement. So I’d like to say well done to all our athletes that even made it as far as London.

Then there’s the medal count. I happen to check a number of media sources at different times and not all of them are based here in Oz. So I find it really interesting to see that different countries establish a nation’s rankings in different manners.

Here in Australia, it was all based on how many gold medals were won, with the silver and bronze used to split it when countries were tied. I find that an astonishing way for a small nation like us to put the tally together. Based on that, we were tenth.

In the US (who won both the most medals and the most gold, they put it together based on total medals won. That put Australia in 7th. Now if I was in the Aussie media, I’d be looking to spin our performance so that it looked as good as it possibly could.

Of course there’s a couple of other ways of putting the tables together as well. There’s medals per head of population, which usually puts Australia in a better spot than we see in other counts (though places like Jamaica smash us because of their sprinters. Then there’s medals per GDP which is another interesting measure. 

I’d be curious to see medals per dollar spent on training, but I sure don’t have the time, inclination or information sources to do that.

What I did do though was put together my own count based on a gold medal being worth 3 points, silver 2 and bronze 1. It says that a medal is important, but it still provides reward for placing better. In that way, Australia also placed 7th.

The other comments I’ll offer on the London event, which I thought went very well are:

1. That I would have to call this round of the olympics the year of the slow-mo montage. I got sick to death of artistic compilations of athletes I’d never heard of (non Aussies in particular) dragging out time and time again while somewhere, somewhere else in the big old thing they call the games, there was probably live sport happening that we could have been watching. I’d estimate that the amount of live sport versus bullshit was probably edging close to 50/50. 
2. That I was ecstatic when channel 9 had the coverage ahead of channel 7, because that meant that I wasn’t going to have to listen to Bruce McAvaney, who drives me nuts. I didn’t factor in how much it would shit me to have Mark Nicholls, a pom, presenting Australian performances. The emotion he brought was simply fake. It was bad enough when he popped up for the Ashes, but this was a step too far.
3. That I should have invested in Foxtel for the event to see events I wanted to see when I wanted to see them instead of being hustled away from a hockey game in which Australia were actually playing to sit through 20 mins of pre-race bullshit for the marathon.

I might have to remind myself of that four years from now in Rio. Or hope that the ABC get’s the rights.