Originally
posted by
locket:
Originally
posted by
Pontius Pirate:
Originally
posted by
locket:
I have always viewed it as the country with the most medals wins, not the most golds. But I expect the USA to win both combinations anyways.
in most countries the table is done by most golds... US seems to be the exception. even with China now though US will probably do better than them in athletics.
How would you have any idea what most countries do? If you have seen olympic coverage in more than a few different countries I'll believe you but that just seems odd to me unless you move a lot :P Canada does it by total medals and not by golds. I don't know what other ones do but I guess we aren't part of the most countries :P The official site has it sortable by golds and total so I guess they see it both ways.
well I've lived in 5 countries but no, I'm not going by that, I'm going by this thing we call the internet ;) see these days you can just look up the olympics section of bild.de or lemonde.fr and see how they do medals
go to wikipedia, look up "Olympic Medal Table"
" Nevertheless, the IOC does publish medal tables for informational purposes, showing the total number of Olympic medals earned by athletes representing each country's respective National Olympic Committee.[2] The convention used by the IOC is to sort by the number of gold medals the athletes from a country have earned. In the event of a tie in the number of gold medals, the number of silver medals is taken into consideration, and then the number of bronze medals. If two countries have an equal number of gold, silver, and bronze medals, they are ordered in the table alphabetically by their IOC country code."
Ok, now that doesn't really prove anything, so go to the source, the NYTimes article:
http://www.nytimes.com/...orts&pagewanted=print
"Need to feel first down at the old Legion hall? Go to an American-based news media outlet, most of which rank the countries based on the overall medal count, which the United States has been leading. Here, and in many places around the world, China is ahead on the basis of a gold-medal surge that has roughly doubled its total haul from the 2000 Sydney Games with six days remaining.
For those who would like this debate to be formally officiated by a ruling authority, do not count on the International Olympic Committee. “If you read the Olympic charter, we actually see the Games as between athletes, not countries,” Giselle Davies, an I.O.C. spokeswoman, said in an interview Monday.
We’ll pass on the charter and read between the lines. Claiming that it is merely making a concession to the news media, fans and athletes who, as Davies said, “end up wanting to see a tally,” the I.O.C. does compile and present on its Web site a final medal table with a disclaimer at the bottom.
“The I.O.C. does not recognize global ranking per country; the medal tallies are displayed for information only,” it reads.
Violating the spirit of its own charter, the I.O.C. lists the countries according to the number of gold medals. Informational or not, based on that tacit nod, the Chinese will be popping Champagne by the end of the week if the current trend continues."
So importantly: most countries do it by gold because the IOC "informational purposes only" table (not a ranking) does it by gold