Olympic Medal Analysis: 3 Myths About China vs. USA – Myth 1

A few days ago I allowed myself to indulge in a little bit of compulsive competitiveness as I proposed a metric for determining which country (China or the USA) “won” the 2008 Beijing Olympics.  In that post I laid-out a scoring system by which one can interpret each country’s performance, by assigning a “score” to each type of medal (3 points for a Gold, 2 points for Silver, 1 point for a Bronze).  (It is recommended that you read that post before proceeding.)

The initial analysis was quick and easy, based on each country’s total number of each medal (China won by a tiny 3-point margin, 223 to 220).  Unsatisfied with this conclusion (for obvious reasons), I decided to delve deeper, in search of some piece of data to help me feel better about being on the wrong side of that particular equation.  Armed with a slew of pro-American biases and prejudices I began thinking about the data from a number of perspectives.  What I found, however, proved most interesting because of the way in which it debunked many of those pre-conceptions.  In particular, I found that 3 assumptions that I had formed while watching the Games and had expected (hoped?) to validate with the data, were in fact, myths.

In order to minimize the chance of boring my readers to sleep with a single enormous post on this subject, I have decided to break this information into 3 separate posts; one for each Myth.  Tonight, we begin with…

Myth #1: The Chinese may be better than the US at events where the athletes are only competing against themselves, but Americans tend to do better in head-to-head events.

Reality:

In order to assess the validity of this statement, I assigned each event to one of three event “types”

• Asynchronous Events – Events in which the athletes perform completely separately from each other.  In other words, they take turns, with one athlete performing, followed by another.  Events that fit into this category include: Gymnastics, Diving, Field events, Weightlifting, Archery, Shooting, etc.
• Synchronous Events – Events in which the athletes perform at the same time, but are not supposed to be directly interacting with each other.  Events that fit into this category include: Swimming, Rowing, Track Events, etc.  Note: In reality, there is some minimal (but not necessarily insignificant) interaction between the athletes in these events, both in terms of strategy, as well as factors such as false starts, riding another swimmer’s wave (or getting caught in their wake), boxing another runner in, etc.
• Head-to-Head Events – Events in which the athletes directly oppose each other.  For one athlete to score, win, or succeed their opponent must lose or fail.  Events that fit into this category include: Basketball, Soccer, Volleyball, Water Polo, Tennis, Table Tennis, Badminton, Baseball, Softball, Beach Volleyball, etc.

The results of this analysis are quite interesting:

China clearly dominates Asynchronous events, whereas the United States succeeds in Synchronous events by an even greater margin.  Most interestingly, however, and counter to what many Americans would probably like to believe, the Chinese actually also control a clear margin of victory in Head-to-Head events.

This surprising fact is likely because most Americans tend to think of Head-to-Head events in terms of those sports that are most popular here in the US (men’s and women’s basketball, softball, baseball, indoor and beach volleyball, water polo, women’s soccer, etc.).  And, to be fair, the US performed overwhelmingly well in these events.  Unfortunately, however, they account for a very small number of medals.  At the same time, the Chinese were able to accumulate a significant number of medals in Head-to-Head events that are more culturally relevant (and popular) in China, while being largely overlooked by American audiences (badminton, table tennis, judo, taekwondo, fencing, boxing, and wrestling).

Stay tuned for Myth #2, coming soon…