The Olympics

Katie met her family in Sydney, and they are now on a flight to New Zealand.  This is the kind of stuff I think about when Mama's not home.

After watching the Sochi Olympics, my quadrennial annoyance flared again because there isn’t a more scientific procedure to determine the winning country.  The truly accurate way would be to award points pro rata to each country based on their performance relative to the best country in each sport.  All the individual sport scores are summed, all equally weighted, to determine the overall Olympic champion.  It’s always bothered me that a single swimmer can win 4 medals in an Olympiad, while a team sport like basketball only has the opportunity to win one.  With this proposed method, the Americans would receive 100 points (or any arbitrarily decided value) for winning the basketball gold medal, and also would collect 88 points for having 88% of the score of the country who won (to pick a sport almost from random) the fencing competition.  It’s not hard to determine the winner of a track or swim meet – they do it all the time all over the world.  Why nobody does this for the Olympics boggles my mind.  

The most prominent reason would probably be that nobody cares that much.  And I don’t either – it’s more work than I feel like doing.  But I did go through and get a weighted medal count for all the past Olympics.  A gold medal counts for 3 points, silver = 2 points, and bronze = 1 point.  After doing this, we can at least get a much better feel for how a country performed than the traditional medal count.  Using this method, the USA came in 4^th place in Sochi.  Below is a historical tabulation of the top 3 finishers in each Olympics.  

I should note that during Russia’s silly communist phase, I just called them “Russia” and not the “Soviet Union”.  Also, I added East and West Germany’s scores together during the post-war years that country was split.  The Red, White, and Blue hasn’t been dominant in the winter games, finishing historically 4^th best, behind Germany, Russia, and Norway.  

I then wanted to see how these top four countries compared with each other at each Olympiad.  

The same was done with the summer games:

Something rather incredible is that out of 27 Summer Olympiads, the United States has finished either first or second 25 times.  In 1988 the USA got 3^rd and we boycotted in 1980.  Pretty impressive.  

And its four best performers historically:

 

It was very surprising to me that Russia didn’t compete in Olympics until 1952.  Indeed, the US didn’t seem to have very much competition at all until the 1930’s.  Another Olympic quirk I’ve never fully understood is the home-country advantage that the host nation seems to get.  It was an especially lucrative benefit in the early 20^th century, as it was expensive and exhausting for people from other countries to travel long distances.  In the 1904 St. Louis Olympics, the USA won an amazing 78 gold medals, 82 silver medals, and 79 bronze medals.  Germany, the second-best performing country, won 4 gold medals.  It was a rout that must have been almost lacking in excitement to watch.  But the home-country advantage still exists, as evidenced by Australia claiming 4^th in the 2000 Sydney Games and the United Kingdom also finishing 4^th at the 2012 London Games, which would both be considered outlier performances.  

1896:  The finest athletes in the world

The games have obviously evolved quite a bit since 1896, but I wish we’d bring back some of the early events.  In 1908, the United Kingdom sent 3 teams (the London police, the Liverpool police, and the mysteriously named “K division” of police) to the Olympics for the Tug-of-War event.  Together, they won the gold, silver, and bronze medals.  Although in those days, competition wasn’t always fierce.  The German and Greek teams withdrew before the competition began, leaving only two non-British teams.  The US team forfeited because the UK teams were allowed to wear police boots, while the Americans presumably planned on tugging in a much less enhancing type of footwear.  In the end, all the Brits had to do was defeat the Swedes, which apparently all of them did.  If added, it wouldn’t be my favorite event, but it certainly would get me more excited than, say, curling.  Tell me people wouldn't get pumped to see a bunch of American football players take on Australian rugby players or some World's Strongest Man competitors from Norland or somewhere.

Put those guns away!

The 1896 games also featured the intriguing event called “1 handed lift”.  This sounded like my kind of event, especially when I read that the inaugural champion was found “very attractive” by the crowd.  The 1900 games in Paris were no less notable.  Two French runners finished first and second in the marathon, but when it was pointed out that they were not covered in mud, they admitted to taking a short cut.  Croquet was an event, but was attended by only one paying spectator.  It was not a diverse sport; 9 of the 10 competing teams were French.  The other was Belgian, which is almost the same thing.