Tally Ho! Olympic Medal Rankings Should Be Weighted

The Olympics are over. However during, it annoyed me how the media outlets ranked the medal totals either counting total medals or counting total golds. Neither option accounts for the relative values of the medals. The former treats all medals as equal, whereas the former disregards the value of the other two medal colors. As others have proposed, a weighted medal count makes the most sense, the simplest being gold = 3, silver = 2, and bronze = 1. With that the top five rankings are as follows:

It’s interesting to note how close China and the USA match up.