Monday, August 18, 2008

Difference in Standings

On the official Beijing 2008 website, the medal standing is ranked according to number of gold medals, in which China, with 35 gold, ranks #1. Over to the US, both yahoo (www.yahoo.com) and msnbc (www.msnbc.com) rank the overall standing according to total number of medals won, in which the US with 65 medals, ranks #1.

In Australia, the sister sites of Yahoo (au.yahoo.com) and MSN (www.ninemsn.com.au)both toe the Olympics party ranking Australia and everyone else according to gold medals.

Personally, I think the empahsis on winning gold is a bit too far away from the spirit of participation in an Olympic. Many many smaller countries could never muster enough talent to win any medal, what more to break a record.
My proposal is to rank the countries according to the medals they win (5 points for a gold, 3 for a silver, and 1 for a bronze), divided by the total population, and then divided by its GDP to get the real standings in each Olympic!

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

dad you think too much. but if you're going to divide by GDP, i would divide by HDI so that living standards are also factored in.. i think.

The Motley Four said...

And no country should be allowed to field more than 2 competitors in each event, no single competitor should be allowed to compete in more than 3 events.