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.