Worthless and Weak

Its the Olympics!!!

With the Olympics, a lot of news orgs will report the "medal count," sometimes listing it by # of golds, often by # of medals (with golds as tiebreakers). This is of course silly, as it treats all events as equal. So I've decided to solve this problem, weighing each medal by a value to give a true measure of what each country has won at the olympics, in a a single number.

The principals we have are as follows:

1: Golds are worth more than silvers, which are worth more than bronzes. (with this, its a 5-3-2 ratio for all events)

2: More popular sports should be worth more than less popular sports. Basketball is worth more than Archery, for instance.

3: Sports more associated with the olympics are worth more than those that aren't. Sports in which the olympics aren't the most important event (ie, soccer, tennis) are penalized.

4: Team medals are worth more than individual medals. So the team Archery gold, for instance, is worth 10, while the individual gold is worth 7.5.

5: Sports are weighed by gender importance, for instance Women's gymnastics is worth more than men's gymnastics

6: Total Gender importance should be equal (the total point value of all women's medals should be equal to the total point value of all men's medals)*

7: Sports with more events (such as swimming) will have fewer points per event, (although may have higher point values total).

8: The Decathlon should have the highest point value of any medal; Equestrian Dressage should have the lowest.

Track and field is the most important Sport, followed by Swimming then Gymnastics.

So, without further ado, after one day of Olympics, here is our top 10:



1 USA 22.25
2 CHN 17.625
3 ITA 15.35
4 AUS 12.5
5 KOR 8.125
6 NED 7.5
7 BRA 6.55
8 JPN 5.26
9 KAZ 3.5
10 COL 2.1


The most valuable medal so far is Australia's 4x100 m freestyle relay (swimming).

I'll try to do a daily update with these.

*I decided on this in theory, then thought about it for a second and realized it would be incredibly hard to execute (especially considering that there is a large difference in the number of women's and men's events). After doing all the calculations, I decided to figure out how far off 50/50 I was. Turns out I was at 1495.2 for men, 1494.8 for women. Wasn't sure how I did that one...

PS- watching women's flyweight weightlifting was pretty amazing, very tiny people lifting horribly large amounts of weight.