Back in 2010, Canada’s goal was to “own the podium” at the Winter Olympics. What “owning the podium” meant was open to interpretation. Some argued for “most gold medals”; others opted for “most overall medals”; still others had point values for the different types of medals. Some argued for normalizing by population (which was won, for London 2012, by Grenada with one medal and a population of 110,821, trailed by Jamaica, Trididad and Tobago, New Zealand, Bahamas, and Slovenia) (*). Others think the whole issue is silly: people win medals, not countries. But still, each Olympics, the question remains: Who won the podium?
I suggested dividing the podium by the fraction of “reasonable” medal weightings that lead to a win by each country. A “reasonable” weighting is one that treats gold at least as valuable as silver; silver at least as valuable as gold; no medal as a negative weight; and with total weighting of 1. By that measure, in Vancouver 2010, the US won with 54.75% of the podium compared to Canada’s 45.25%. In London 2012, the US owned the entire podium.
The Sochi Olympics have just finished and the result is…. Russia in a rout. Here are the medal standings:
Since Russia has more Gold medals than anyone else plus more “Gold+Silver” plus more overall, there are no reasonable weightings for gold, silver, and bronze that result in anyone but the Russian Federation from winning.
Nonetheless, I think Canada will take golds in Mens and Womens hockey along with Mens and Womens curling (among others) and declare this a successful Olympics.
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(*) I note that some sports limit the number of entries by each country, giving a disadvantage to larger countries for population based rankings (there is only one US hockey team, for instance but Lithuania also gets just one).
Anyway, if the Netherlands had mountains, they would have won everything (besides speed skating) too ;o)