{"id":1846,"date":"2014-02-23T11:15:29","date_gmt":"2014-02-23T15:15:29","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/mat.tepper.cmu.edu\/blog\/?p=1846"},"modified":"2014-02-23T11:15:29","modified_gmt":"2014-02-23T15:15:29","slug":"russia-really-owned-this-podium","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mat.tepper.cmu.edu\/blog\/index.php\/2014\/02\/23\/russia-really-owned-this-podium\/","title":{"rendered":"Russia really owned this podium"},"content":{"rendered":"

Back in 2010, Canada’s \u00a0goal was to “own the podium” at the Winter Olympics. \u00a0What “owning the podium” meant was open to interpretation. \u00a0Some argued for “most gold medals”; others opted for “most overall medals”; still others had point values for the different types of medals. \u00a0Some argued for normalizing by population (which was won, for London 2012<\/a>, 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. \u00a0But still, each Olympics, the question remains: Who won the podium?<\/p>\n

I suggested dividing the podium by the fraction of “reasonable” medal weightings that lead to a win by each country. \u00a0A “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. \u00a0By that measure, in Vancouver 2010<\/a>, the US won with 54.75% of the podium compared to Canada’s 45.25%. \u00a0In London 2012<\/a>, the US owned the entire podium.<\/p>\n

The Sochi Olympics have just finished and the result is…. Russia in a rout. \u00a0Here are the medal standings:<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

\"2014medals\"<\/a><\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

———————————————————————————<\/p>\n

(*)\u00a0\u00a0I 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).<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Back in 2010, Canada’s \u00a0goal was to “own the podium” at the Winter Olympics. \u00a0What “owning the podium” meant was open to interpretation. \u00a0Some argued for “most gold medals”; others opted for “most overall medals”; still others had point values for the different types of medals. \u00a0Some argued for normalizing by population (which was won, … Continue reading “Russia really owned this podium”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[51],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1846","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-sports"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mat.tepper.cmu.edu\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1846","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mat.tepper.cmu.edu\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mat.tepper.cmu.edu\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mat.tepper.cmu.edu\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mat.tepper.cmu.edu\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1846"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/mat.tepper.cmu.edu\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1846\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mat.tepper.cmu.edu\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1846"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mat.tepper.cmu.edu\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1846"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mat.tepper.cmu.edu\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1846"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}