Before the olympics even started on a different forum I called... 1. USA 2. Russia 3. China 4. Aussies 5. Japan Glad to see I picked the right order, I'm guessing that will be the standings at the end.
Well, it depends which method of ranking you're using. The official ranking system from Athens webpage uses gold medals as a standard which puts China 2nd place and only 1 behind USA. If you look at total medals then yes, Russia is 2nd and one ahead of China right now. China should be able to maintain 2nd place in golds if they can pick up the rest of their diving, get one in volleyball, and a few in their remaining events. Japan's basically done now with a few medal chances left in synchro swimming, wrestling, etc.. They will probably fall back a few once Germany and France etc. finish up and Russia gets more golds. But they have done much much better than they did at Sydney and have proved to the world that they've once again returned to 2nd best in Asia, ahead of South Korea.
Yeah I go by total medals... I mean if the standings HYPOTHETICALLY are... China, 24 gold, 10 silver, 5 bronze and USA 23 gold, 35 silver, 14, bronze Who do you think deserves top spot? USA has one less gold but their olympic team got wayy more medals and was obviously more successful.
I disagree, it's all about Gold baby, silver is best loser and almost no one remembers who got silver at the end of the day, let's not even talk about Bronze By your argument, Denmark (1 Gold, 5 Bronze) has done better than New Zealand (3 gold, 1 Bronze)
what if it is: country 1 : 14 gold, 0 silver, 0 bronze country 2 : 0 gold, 0 silver, 15 bronze then who deserves a top spot? i don't think one can argue that a gold is worth much more than a silver/bronze. and i also like to go by the official ranking in the official site.
I have to disagree... I think that the criteria for rankings should be golds won. It wouldn't be fair, to me at least for a country who wins say 1 silver and 1 bronze medal to claim they are better than a country that won a gold. Take badminton for example, if Gade had beaten Lin Dan in the semis (and Lin Dan went on to take the bronze) and Chen Hong in the final that puts Chine with 2 medals and Denmark with only 1 but the truth is, that one gold was earned by beating the other two medalist. Don't you think?
maybe do it like chess, award points for each kill or medal in this case. I would give gold 5 points, silver 3 points, bronze 1 point, and rerank the whole list.
We used to do this in high school to work out which house won the athletics or swimming, can't remember what they used to be though, I always only cared about coming first ;P
Yeah I was just going to say that... 3 points gold, 2 silver, and 1 for bronze or something like it. It would make sense. Many sports do it for wins and ties. Either way Russia has 144 million people while China has 1.3 billion, almost 10 times the amount of people. It's clear who is better pound for pound.
.........G...S...B..M.. Cooler Point system 1 USA 28 31 25 84.....138.... 2 CHN 25 17 12 54...... 88 3 AUS 16 11 16 43......129 4 RUS 15 21 24 60......102 5 JPN 15 9 10 34 .......112 6 GER 12 13 17 42.......116 well, if u go by that standard, australia beats russia's pants off. Aus. has a population of 20 million as of Dec 31 2003. By my point system, the free worlds kick the pants of the commies.
see, that's the problem with the point system. now we will start disagreeing on how many points a gold/silver/bronze should have.
Cooler, by any standard, China should have more points than the Aussies, Japanese and Germans as the CHNese have more golds and more silvers??! What is the point method you used in the above??
I think he was going by population. But I mean you guys are saying China has more golds bla bla bla... But it isn't even remotely close anymore (total medals). Russia has 84 medals while china has 62. If we go by 3 for gold, 2 for silver, 1 for bronze (which I think is fair) USA= 206 pts Russia= 156 pts China= 141 pts Australia= 99 pts Germany= 90 pts Japan= 76 pts And since China has 10 times the population, etc... Russia's easily the winner in my book.
If we give points to each of the medals then gold should be at least 2 points more than silver as it's a totally different idea between the world's best and the world's top loser. As well, the excuse that China's only doing well because of her population has been used many times and I have seen so much discussions about it. If population is the reason for success, why then does India, with a population well over 1 billion, have only 1 medal right now???????????????? Population is far less of a contributing factor to national sporting success than money input, grassroot development programs, number of people playing competitve sports, sporting infrastructure, world-class facilities, level of overall competition and so on.......... Also, what's misleading about China is that ~70% of the population is farming/agriculture based. Couple that with the fact that schooling and academics are WAY more important than sports in China and ultimately in the end, there's probably several times more people playing sports in, say, the USA than there is in China.
as i said, if we start giving out points, we will be spending a lot of time argue over what how much point shoudl be given to each medal.
How many ranking systems are there? I think there is only one official one, and that is the Olympic Games Committee. The other one is the American one, which gives a bronze medal equal points to a gold medal winner. You think it makes sense? I wonder if they would still use the same system if, along the line of Kwun's earlier post, the medal standings are China 0 gold, 0 silver, 100 bronze, and the US 99 gold, 0 silver, and 0 bronze? Of course not? Is there such a thing as an Olympic Games completely free of politics?
-I had already defined my point system in previous post: 5 for gold, 3 for silver, 1 for bronze - Agreed with Hugo. Population is not a good base to predict olympic success. Technically, china is still a 3rd world country.
Yet another system? Cooler, your point system will probably give birth to a hundred variations of the points system. Then each nation can use the one that shows itself punching way above its real punching weight. Let us give credit to the IOC. They have held many successful Olympics, and I believe the Olympic system as chosen by the IOC in a democratic process, has been agreed to bya majority of the competing countries.
I think using Gold only is the way to go. Silver and Bronze should be used if two countries have the same gold numbers (a tie), then they compare silvers, if it's still the same, then, they compare the bronzes. However, if you still want to use the point system, then I would like to increase Gold's value. Gold=10 pts, Silver=2 pts, and Bronze=1 pt.
