Well, it had to be brought up eventually and after reading this post, I felt obliged to write my thoughts on one of the stupidest aspects of the Olympics: the medal count. If you’ve been watching over here in China you are reminded of it by CCTV at pretty much every commercial break, probably very similar to what my family is seeing on NBC back home. The only difference being that the numbers are naturally interpreted differently depending on which side of the Pacific you are watching from.
In the post linked above, the charge is that the U.S. is “cooking the books” to make it look like they are ahead. Unlike the Chinese method which says that a country with 1 gold medal should be ranked above a country wth 2, 3, or even 100 silver medals, the U.S. system puts equal value on all medals and just does a simple tally of the total. To my knowledge, this U.S. way of counting medals is nothing new despite the post’s claims that the Americans have “invented” a new way of counting in order to keep the lead. (Have the Chinese used the method described above in past Olympics as well? Any other methods out there?)
Obviously, both methods have their flaws. The U.S. system probably unfairly removes the “worth” of a gold versus a silver versus a bronze medal (the medal that make orphans cry), while the logic of the Chinese system seems to break down when you can have countries with multiple athletes receiving silver and bronze awards ranked below those that only have a single gold medal winner. (More of a “Gold Medal Count” than a “Medal Count” in my opinion, but to each his own…)
Personally, I wish the IOC could just ban broadcasts of the medal tallies and let the crazy nationalists of the world who HAVE to know which country is the “best” tally things at home, either that or have an official IOC-sanctioned tally that takes the question of “how to count medals” off the table. On the other extreme, you could ban national symbols of any kind be used during the Olympics with the focus on individual rather than national performances, but I guess that would be against what the event is about, if not a little more gentle on the international community’s increasingly fragile nerves…
Richard Burger is the author of Behind the Red Door: Sex in China, an exploration of China's sexual revolution and its clash with traditional Chinese values.