Why Australia Is Dominating the Olympics

It's absurd to track who's "winning" the Olympics. We shouldn't do it. But, of course, we're human, so we do.

Yahoo! Sports says the United States is beating China, followed by Australia, France and Russia. Why? Because the U.S. has 54 medals, compared with the other countries' respective 47, 25, 22 and 21 overall medals. But China has 27 gold medals, and and the U.S. has 16. Surely gold medals are worth more than silver, and silver more than bronze. So is China "winning"?

The medal competition between China and USA really masks extremely impressive national Olympic achievement by smaller countries. Simply counting medals is like comparing relative math ability among high school students not by averaging test scores, but adding them up. We don't do that for academics. Why do we do it with sports? Deep down, we all know the "just-add-up-the-medals" "scoring system" is wrong.

If we're going to pick winners in the national medal count -- and we are -- I think we should use a system that comes closer to fairly rewarding real national achievement.

There are many factors that contribute to Olympic greatness. The major factors include:

1. Population
2. Per-capita income
3. State control of Olympic training
4. Cultural tradition of sport
5. Gender equality

Of these five, China is advantaged by factors 1, 3 and 5. The United States is advantaged by 2, 4, and 5.

Some MIT genius could build a software program that takes into account all these factors. But it would be too complex for practical use. Also: It makes some sense to "reward" countries for factors 2-5.

I'd like to propose a simple system that normalizes for two factors: 1) population; and 2) medal "quality." By doing this, you immediately eliminate the advantage of population, and give countries of all sizes a fair shot. Then, you rightfully account for the fact that gold is better than silver, and silver better than bronze.

Here's the system

Each gold gets 300 points; silver 200 and bronze 100 points. Add up the points, then divide by millions of population. Whoever has the biggest number wins.

So let's see how various countries do using this system.

As of this writing, the United States had 16 gold, 16 silver and 22 bronze medals, and has a population of about 300 million. So multiplying gold medals by 300, silver medals by 200, and bronze by 100, the U.S. gets 10,200 medal points. Now divide by the number of million population -- in America's case, 300 -- the USA currently earns a score of 34.

Let's do China. As of this posting, China had 27 gold medals, 13 silver and 7 bronze and a population of 1.3 billion. That gives China more medal points than the United States -- 11,400 medal points -- but after dividing by China's massive population, it gets a lower score of just under 9.

So the U.S. is clobbering China. But other countries are clobbering the United States. Using this same system, the top three Olympic countries are:

#1: Australia (235 points)
#2: Cuba (118 points)
#3: South Korea (87 points)

Of course, this system isn't perfectly fair. But I do believe it's fairest *simple* system for scoring -- and infinitely more telling than just adding up medals and ignoring population size and medal quality. And I believe it accurately recognizes the colossal achievement of smaller countries -- especially Australia and Cuba, who should be the real national stars of the games thus far.

That Australia is dominating the Olympics makes intuitive sense, too. Compared with overall medal leader USA, Australia has a little less than half the medals as the United States, but less than 6 percent of the population. That kind of incredible Olympic achievement should be loudly recognized.