2008 Summer Olympic Rankings by the American Standard

That's one tasty gold medal

It’s no secret that the USOC (United States Olympic Committee) rewards American athletes for medaling in the Olympics. The current remuneration schedule is as follows: $25,000 for a gold medal, $15,000 for a silver medal, and $10,000 for a bronze medal.

So, I thought to myself, “Self, what would the Overall Medal Standings look like if the American standard for medal value were applied to every country?”

So I got busy and and put together a table of what the rankings would look like if the American Standard were applied:

[table=119]

The original and official overall medal standings can be found here.

So, gentle reader, I ask this of you.  What can we take away from this?  Let’s take a look at Armenia, shall we?  Armenia raises some interesting questions.  As you can see from the table, Armenia won no gold medals and no silver medals, but they did win 6 bronze medals.  In the official standings, that placed Armenia in 79th place (out of 81 ranked countries).  That means that in the original standings, a country like Tunisia, which won 1 gold medal and nothing else, is ranked ahead of Armenia (Tunisia is ranked in 52nd place).

Let it be known that I have zero affiliation with either country, and am only using them for demonstration purposes.  Having said that, is the official ranking fair?  Is Tunisia’s 1 gold medal that much better than Armenia’s 6 bronze medals?

Now, if you look back on my table above, when weighting the medals according to the American standard (for lack of a better word), Armenia finds itself to be ranked in 44th place and Tunisia drops to 63rd place.  In this humble blogger’s opinion, this seems to be more fair.  Is it accurate to give Armenia the same “score” as Croatia and Lithuania, which each won 2 silvers and 3 bronzes?  Probably not.  Croatia and Lithuania should probably be ranked higher than Armenia on my table, so that suggests that it’s not a perfect scoring system.

What do you guys think?  Is the official ranking system flawed?  Or am I just being retarded?

P.S.  I realize that applying the American Standard is rather ethno-centric, but whatever.  It’s just one way of showing that the official method for ranking may be flawed.