Olympic Medal Analysis: China vs. USA. Who Won?

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Much has been made of the medal race between the USA and China during the recent Bejing Olympics. Every night Bob Costas would sign-off of NBC’s primetime broadcast with a summary of the “standings” that generally focused on the close race between these two dominant countries. Amusingly, his summary could pretty consistently be boiled-down to “well, the US is leading in the total number of medals won, but China is kicking ass in Gold Medals.” Given these two metrics, neither of which was clearly superior to the other, and which produced apparently contradictory results with regards to the question of “who is winning?” Costas seemed content to leave the answer conveniently ambiguous.

I, however, being competitive to a fault, became consumed with this issue. Not since the days of the Soviet Union had the United States faced a legitimate challenge in terms of overall Olympic Medal performance (at a Summer Games, anyway). I watched Olympics compulsively. For 2 weeks my life consisted of, in order of time spent on each: work, the Olympics, and sleep. I found myself not only cheering for every American athlete lucky enough to earn 5 minutes of tacit television coverage, no matter how slim their chances of medaling, but I also found myself taking perverse glee in every Chinese disappointment, every gymnastic stumble (of which there were FAR too few), every tragic injury, and every disappointing finish. My competitive nature, combined with my nationalistic pride, produced an irrational loathing of Chinese athletic success, even as I admired the beauty of their country, their graciousness as hosts, and the dignity and sportsmanship of their competitors.

When the games finally concluded Costas seemed just as flummoxed on the subject of the medal count as he had been all along. While Bob may have been content to call it “pretty much a tie,” I felt compelled to dig deeper. The first issue that needed to be resolved was the question of what metric should be used to determine the “winner.” To put all of the emphasis on Gold Medals, as those who favor the Chinese would surely advocate, begs the question of why Silver and Bronze medals are even awarded. Counting all medals equally, however, clearly fails to appreciate the fact that a Gold medal is, by its very nature, considered more valuable than a Silver or a Bronze.

Fortunately, this conundrum has arisen and been resolved before. As anyone who has played any legitimate amount of Mario Kart will tell you, there is a simple scoring system by which one can determine an overall winner based on the total number of Gold, Silver, and Bronze trophies (or in this case, medals) they have won:

• Gold Medal = 3 points
• Silver Medal = 2 points
• Bronze Medal = 1 Point

After a little time spent transcribing data from the Official Beijing Olympics website into Excel, creating some pivot tables, and few basic arithmetic functions, I produced some truly fascinating data. Using this system, here are the Scores for the Top 10 countries at the Beijing Olympics:

The result? China wins, but by the narrowest of margins: 223 points to 220 points. In other words, if EITHER of the American 4×100m Relay teams had gone on to win Gold instead of dropping the freaking batons, the entire Olympics would have resulted in a perfect tie between the US and China. Of course, this kind of hypothetical conjecture is completely unfair, as both countries have countless similar examples of medal near-misses , but it’s hard not to think about it.

So, hats-off to China. At least now we have an unambiguous answer to the question based on a straightforward and logical metric. What happens next? Will the US respond to the end of 16 years of total Olympic dominance with increased focus and determination? Or will China ride the tidal wave of momentum that allowed them to surge past the US to an even greater margin of victory? I cannot wait for 2012.

On a final note: stay tuned. Later this week I will post further analysis of this data that reveals some fascinatingly counter-intuitive trends regarding these two countries’ performance. In the meantime, I would very much like to hear any thoughts/conjecture that you readers might have regarding how and why China managed to beat the US, and what the significance of that fact might be…