2024 Paris Olympics

[anty1975]

I think we watched great Olympics with many memorable moments. Not perfect of course, my grievances are about too shallow pool used for swimming and about endless postponements of triathlon competitions cause Seine's water quality wasn't good enough. But everything can't be perfect. Thanks France!

[Chambord]

So in the end USA top the medal table by one single point in the women's basketball final! Equal on golds with China now, just 1 gold above them in Tokyo. What a rivalry!

[Firnen]

So in the end USA top the medal table by one single point in the women's basketball final! Equal on golds with China now, just 1 gold above them in Tokyo. What a rivalry!

Let's hope at some point we will see multiple countries competing for the top of the table and not USA and Chin with double the golds from the rest.

It looks though that Japan and Australia (especially them) are in a more upwards trajectory than the big European nations - are European countries following the wrong system or just not wanting to invest in their athletes as much?

[Lorric]

So in the end USA top the medal table by one single point in the women's basketball final! Equal on golds with China now, just 1 gold above them in Tokyo. What a rivalry!

Let's hope at some point we will see multiple countries competing for the top of the table and not USA and Chin with double the golds from the rest.

It looks though that Japan and Australia (especially them) are in a more upwards trajectory than the big European nations - are European countries following the wrong system or just not wanting to invest in their athletes as much?

Only country you might see going at it with them is Russia. The rest either don't have the numbers or the resources. Australia is famously great at sports, racks up medals in swimming, which has the greatest abundance of them available, and gets aided by qualifying through Oceania and Japan has about double the population of big Western European countries.

[Chambord]

For the next 2 Summer Games I expect USA to win the table much more comfortably and Australia to get a hold on 3rd place. As for the European countries, they'll always have a hard time challenging for the top spots in this, simply because they can't match the selection base of the countries above. You need a pool of hundreds of millions in population from where to draw to sports and from those to select the top athletes. And it's also a cultural thing. I feel a career in sports is much more valued in USA and China than in Europe.

[Lorric]

For the next 2 Summer Games I expect USA to win the table much more comfortably and Australia to get a hold on 3rd place. As for the European countries, they'll always have a hard time challenging for the top spots in this, simply because they can't match the selection base of the countries above. You need a pool of hundreds of millions in population from where to draw to sports and from those to select the top athletes. And it's also a cultural thing. I feel a career in sports is much more valued in USA and China than in Europe.

Is that last part really true though? Start combining European Countries and they get more medals by population. Take us, France and Netherlands and that's 45 golds for about half the US population.

[anty1975]

For the next 2 Summer Games I expect USA to win the table much more comfortably and Australia to get a hold on 3rd place. As for the European countries, they'll always have a hard time challenging for the top spots in this, simply because they can't match the selection base of the countries above. You need a pool of hundreds of millions in population from where to draw to sports and from those to select the top athletes. And it's also a cultural thing. I feel a career in sports is much more valued in USA and China than in Europe.

Next Games will be home Games for US, of course they'll easily top the medals table. 2032 Games its too early to call

[Chambord]

For the next 2 Summer Games I expect USA to win the table much more comfortably and Australia to get a hold on 3rd place. As for the European countries, they'll always have a hard time challenging for the top spots in this, simply because they can't match the selection base of the countries above. You need a pool of hundreds of millions in population from where to draw to sports and from those to select the top athletes. And it's also a cultural thing. I feel a career in sports is much more valued in USA and China than in Europe.

Is that last part really true though? Start combining European Countries and they get more medals by population. Take us, France and Netherlands and that's 45 golds for about half the US population.

If you ask Euronews, EU really destroyed these Olympics and USA and China didn't have a chance

https://www.euronews.com/2024/07/29/par ... edal-table

[Chambord]

But as far as Olympics medal tables go, the wildest thing to ever happen probably remains Romania finishing second in (hello Los Angeles!) 1984.

[SimonB]

For the next 2 Summer Games I expect USA to win the table much more comfortably and Australia to get a hold on 3rd place. As for the European countries, they'll always have a hard time challenging for the top spots in this, simply because they can't match the selection base of the countries above. You need a pool of hundreds of millions in population from where to draw to sports and from those to select the top athletes. And it's also a cultural thing. I feel a career in sports is much more valued in USA and China than in Europe.

Is that last part really true though? Start combining European Countries and they get more medals by population. Take us, France and Netherlands and that's 45 golds for about half the US population.

If you ask Euronews, EU really destroyed these Olympics and USA and China didn't have a chance

https://www.euronews.com/2024/07/29/par ... edal-table

This is rather difficult to analyze though since there is only 1 US and 1 China, if each of these sent athletes per state/province in sport where they were strong they might accumulate more medals than Europe or maybe not? It would be difficult to call.

[Lorric]

Is that last part really true though? Start combining European Countries and they get more medals by population. Take us, France and Netherlands and that's 45 golds for about half the US population.

If you ask Euronews, EU really destroyed these Olympics and USA and China didn't have a chance

https://www.euronews.com/2024/07/29/par ... edal-table

This is rather difficult to analyze though since there is only 1 US and 1 China, if each of these sent athletes per state/province in sport where they were strong they might accumulate more medals than Europe or maybe not? It would be difficult to call.

But if you measure just by golds, there can only be one World champion, right? I get there are some sports where we'd get a bunch of chances to their only one, but the gap is too big I would have thought for this to be enough to explain it. The most reliable would be those sports where it's all down to the athlete. Nodody can interfere with like a diver, a weightlifter. Also more reliable are those with multiple entrants. And the simpler the sport, the more reliable I would think. Things with the most random elements would be team sports, but China generally suck at team sports anyway.

[anty1975]

But as far as Olympics medal tables go, the wildest thing to ever happen probably remains Romania finishing second in (hello Los Angeles!) 1984.

All Eastern Bloc countries except Romania boycotted those Games and so in many sports like artistic gymnastics or weightlifting Romania suddenly became dominant nation without any competition Not the first time Ceaușescu's foreign policy hadn't been in line with orders from Moscow, he was surprisingly independent in many cases.

[Lorric]

Alex Yee (triathlon winner) and Briony Page (Trampoline winner) are our flag bearers.

[DumoKing]

Heard a factoid from Finland. As they failed to win a single medal, Sweden are now alone with the longest run of winning at least one medal per game, stretching back to 1908. But I suspect most countries fail in one of these categories:

A) has not existed for that long
B) boycotted Moscow in 1980
C) boycotted LA in 1984
D) not participating in Winter Olympics

[diyx]

It would be interesting if there was a medal table by discipline to decide who's best at multiple disciplines. All disciplines would be equal, so for example hockey would be just as valuable as swimming, by using the individual discipline's medal table to calculate who's best. So for those two:

Swimming:
Gold: United States (8/13/7)
Silver: Australia (7/9/3)
Bronze: France (4/1/2) (I loved the "ALLEZ!" on every stroke of a French athlete btw. )

Hockey:
Gold: Netherlands (2/0/0)
Silver: China and Germany (0/1/0)

I like the idea. This could give a better representation of the countries strength across different sports (yet, I wouldn't say the adjusted medal table is better than the original one, just a different view).

The way I would do it is by dividing the medals by the total number of disciplines in each sports and then sum up the medal counts.

For example, there were 37 events in swimming and 2 events in hockey.
So the score in swimming would be
8/37 gold (~0.22), 13/37 silver, and 7/37 bronze for the USA
...

The score in hockey would be
2/2 gold (= 1) for the Netherlands
1/2 silver (=0.5) for Germany
...