The Olympic Medal Count

Tired of Olympic posts yet?  I'll be done with them soon.  Promise.  But not yet.  Because there's still plenty of things that happened in Paris to talk about. 

I haven't touched on the whole controversy surrounding Jordan Chiles and her bronze medal, which I think still has a few twists and turns left in it.  The only thing I'll say about that right now is how I don't like that the term "stripped" is being used.  That implies she did something wrong.  She didn't.  None of the athletes involved did.  (Frankly, neither did either team's coaches.)  I understand that it's being used for lack of a better term, but it still doesn't sit well with me.

Nor have I tackled the misleading reports that breaking was "dropped" from the Olympic program for 2028.  That's simply not true.  Breaking was never going to be included in the LA Games.  The 2028 Olympic sports were finalized last year, and breaking wasn't among them.  So, we weren't going to see it in LA regardless of how its debut in Paris went.  To imply it was "dropped" for LA because of how it was received in Paris is just incorrect.

Instead, I'm going to talk about the medal count.  More specifically how the daily medal count is tabulated and displayed.  This was a very big topic of conversation during the first week of the Games especially, when the U.S. swim team was busy collecting a whole lot of silver and bronze, but not that much gold.  As a result, NBC and other American media outlets had the U.S. near the top of the medal standings, while the rest of the world, which uses gold medals, had the U.S. much further down.

This is usually something that works itself out in the end.  The U.S. has won the most total medals at every Olympics since 1996 and has won the most golds at every Olympics in that same span except for 2008, when host China held a 48-36 edge (it was originally 51, but three Chinese weightlifters had their gold medals taken away for doping).  At the last two Olympics, though, it's gone right down to the wire.  In Tokyo, the U.S. won two golds on the final day to edge China 39-38, while thanks to the American victory in the women's basketball gold medal game, which was literally the last event of the Games, it was a 40-40 tie in Paris (the first time there's ever been a tie atop the final medal standings at the Olympics).

Early in the Olympics, when the U.S. was lagging behind in the gold-medal tally, is when it was really noticeable.  Which is what led to the questions about where the U.S. actually stood in the medal tally.  And the answer is both are correct.  The IOC is very clear that there's no "official" medal tally.  It's listed strictly for informational purposes, but there's no "right" way to display it. 

Most countries only care about gold medals, so that's the method they choose.  That's also how the IOC displays the medal tally.  The United States, meanwhile, prefers to use total medals, where the U.S. is likely to be at or near the top.  Frankly, nations are going to use whichever makes them look the best.  Which is something the IOC is totally fine with.  (In the event of a tie for gold medals, whoever has the most silver medals is used as the tiebreaker, then the most bronzes, so the U.S. officially finished at the top of both tables in Paris.)

There's also the point system, which isn't commonly used and is pretty much the same as the overall medal tally.  Using this method, you can either go 5 points for a gold, 3 for a silver and 1 for a bronze or 3-2-1.  With the point system, the U.S. would've easily won with 374 points compared to China's 278 (or 250-198 using 3-2-1 scoring).  This isn't as straightforward as using just the medals won, however, so I can see why it isn't the preferred method.

While the debate over which method of displaying the medal standings is "correct" is at least valid, I saw an article yesterday that made a simply absurd argument that neither should be used.  The author of this article seemed to think that team sports get the shaft in the medal count since team sport medals count the same as individual events in the tally.  So, instead of one total gold medal for the nation, he wants gold medals in team sports to count as one gold medal for each individual.  Basketball would count as 12 gold medals, track and swimming relays would count as four, etc.

Part of his argument is that only counting a team event as one medal doesn't account for all of the individuals who actually came home with medals.  There were 13 players on the Serbian men's water polo team.  All of them received medals.  Serbia's medal tally only counts it as one, though, since the Serbian team won the gold medal.

He used Kevin Durant as another example.  Durant just won his fourth Olympic gold medal.  He has four physical gold medals.  Not 1/3 of one medal.  All 12 members of the team receive a gold medal.  Not 1/12 of one.  So, his argument is basically based on the premise that the number of individual gold medals awarded to athletes from a given country should be what's counted, regardless of whether they're in an individual or team event.

That argument is flawed for several reasons, though.  First and foremost, it would also be an inaccurate measure because the number of athletes in team events varies.  Some team events include just two competitors.  Some involve three.  Even in relays, the number isn't always the same.  Nations can sub out athletes between the prelims and the final.  Some may use the same four in both rounds.  And, while this almost never happens, another could theoretically replace everybody and use eight different athletes (you still get a medal if you run in the prelims, but not the final).  So, even within the same event, the same number of medals aren't necessarily being awarded.

Meanwhile, team sports are exactly that.  Team sports.  LeBron James and Stephen Curry received the same gold medal as Jayson Tatum and Tyrese Haliburton, who barely played in Paris.  In 1980, Steve Janaszak didn't play a second in Lake Placid as Jim Craig's backup, but he still got a gold medal with the rest of the Miracle On Ice hockey team.  Those gold medals are equal regardless of how much playing time the player got or how big their contribution was.

Perhaps most importantly, and the best counterargument that can be made, is that the medal tally tracks each event.  The basketball tournaments might've taken two weeks, but they still only counted as two events--the men's tournament and the women's tournament.  The number of individuals who contributed to that gold medal doesn't change the fact that, officially, it's still just one event.

And, frankly, counting the individual number of gold medals awarded to each athlete in a team event would just be confusing!  There were 329 total events in Paris.  Thus, there were 329 gold medals.  Everyone understands that they weren't all individual events and more than 329 people actually received gold medals.  That doesn't diminish their contributions.  It simply acknowledges that they were part of gold medal-winning team.

Gold medals won as a part of a team are no less valuable than those won individually.  Just because an athlete wins a gold medal in a team event, that doesn't change the fact that they won it.  The medal count doesn't keep track of how many individual medals athletes received, though.  It tracks how many events a country won.  And team sport tournaments are just one event.  Thus, they only count as one medal for the country.  It's been that way for 128 years and it ain't changing anytime soon!