Mishmash Musings

So which country do you think is doing the best at the Olympics? I guess that depends on whether you live in the United States or in the rest of the world. Apparently, when viewing American-based news sources, the table listing Olympic medals shows the U.S. at the top because of the total number of medals won (i.e. gold, silver, and bronze).

News sources from most other countries, however, show China at the top of the medals chart because they base the count on gold medals only. All of the European and Asian news sources that I’ve checked list the Olympic results this way. Here’s a medal table from the Guardian newspaper in the UK:

And then there are some places that prefer to list the top countries based on medals per capita, which at this year’s event, would put Jamaica in the lead. After all, these people argue, of course China and the U.S. are going to get a ton of medals when they each send nearly 700 athletes to the games!

I personally don’t care how people rank countries in the Olympics because I hate almost all the events. But I just thought it was interesting that there are so many different kinds of tallies out there.

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