The Medal Count: Digging for Gold in Rio

[galaxygirl76]

The first Olympics I remember watching was Barcelona. I was aware of LA(13 medals total) and Seoul(9 medals total) but the time difference wasn't great for a kid to be able to watch it. We won 2 gold medals in '92(15 medals total) followed by Atlanta where we won 4 gold(19 medals total). It wasn't until Sydney that the amount of gold medals from Amsterdam '28 got passed. Yes, you read that right. 1928.

[Superpole2000]

13 hours ago, Daisy said:

• Majority of medals won by women - positive! (apparently, Canada was pumping a lot of money into that)

Why is this a good thing? Women winning medals is good, of course, but women winning more than men can't be the goal.

[maraleia]

3 minutes ago, Superpole2000 said:

Why is this a good thing? Women winning medals is good, of course, but women winning more than men can't be the goal.

The thing is women were denied these opportunities for decades so it's all about parity over a larger period of time.

[galaxygirl76]

10 minutes ago, maraleia said:

The thing is women were denied these opportunities for decades so it's all about parity over a larger period of time.

For example women weren't allowed to run anything longer than the 200m on the track until 1960. Women were allowed in the marathon in 1984.

Edited August 21, 2016 by galaxygirl76

[mtlchick]

@Daisy: kick ass insight on our medal haul.  (There is one more person in wrestling who is going for bronze later today so we may be lucky.) 

 

Quote

ROWING. CANADA. Holy crap. that was a massive egg they laid in Brazil. For rowing, they sent 7 boats, only 2 made the A final, and 1 won silver. (and that one team pretty much told RCA to kick rocks). poor showings in the b finals. Canoe/Kayak out of all their boats, the best finish was 6th. (the gold medalist favourite finished seventh). This is a massive, massive kick in the gut for the heaviest funded programme in Canadian sports (outside of Hockey Canada for obvious reasons). 17 million dollars, and only 1 medal to show for it, and horrendous results. no one set personal bests or anything. They are already expecting changes from the HP-CEO (High Performance). and they already admitted in several news articles, that their funding is going to be obviously cut. due to two dismal Olympic regattas - but they already warned that it's also very hard to turn a programme around in four years so Tokyo might see some of the same results. 

 

It goes to show that the "Canadian stereotype" of canoe and kayak and rowing fell hard.  And that is because to internal strife.  http://olympics.cbc.ca/news/article/canoe-kayak-canada-reeling-from-internal-strife-report.html

 

Thrilled that Penny is our closing ceremony flag bearer.  I predict DeGrasse will be leading the charge in Tokyo if he stays healthy and does damage at the Worlds next year and 2019. 

[Superpole2000]

39 minutes ago, maraleia said:

The thing is women were denied these opportunities for decades so it's all about parity over a larger period of time.

It would be great if opportunity parity was the prevailing message, but instead it is often presented as a subtle (or not so subtle) shot at men not keeping up with women. We all saw the "Did we even send any Canadian men to the Olympics?" comments throughout the first week of the games. De Grasse put a stop to most of that, but without him it would have been nauseating.

[Daisy]

Own the Podium and Road to Excellence were focusing on market deficiencies  (well that's what we call them in Hockey, but that's really obvious what they were doing here) in how to maximize the medal haul for Canada, and it was shown that the best way to do that was with women sports. [for a myriad of reasons - either relatively new, (Ie: Rugby Sevens), or the field of competitiveness isn't that deep, or you could train and exploit that "flaw".  And if you look at the amount of women sent - 314 athletes sent - 60% of them were women = more medals won by woman. It's like the medals per capita thing - but by gender. 

Historically speaking Canada usually splits down the middle (or the skew is 2 medals more for men, or 4 more women won, or it's dead split). it wouldn't surprise me if in Tokyo, even with the extra funding, if it skews back towards the mean. 

You also have to remember that the male athletes did not perform as well in these games. I dont think all of that is due to funding. the men's soccer team has been crap for so long I don't even know if they were ever good (and they didn't even go). Neither did men's basketball. Men's field hockey were blegh. Shawn Barber had a bad night in the office, and once again it always goes back down to Canoe/Kayak/Rowing. had Canada's males who were all medal contenders medaled, all of a sudden the medal split is more even. (and OTP's plan still works, because we've maximized (and performed well) in where they were targeting. ). 

[Daisy]

37 minutes ago, mtlchick said:

@Daisy: kick ass insight on our medal haul.  (There is one more person in wrestling who is going for bronze later today so we may be lucky.) 

 

 

It goes to show that the "Canadian stereotype" of canoe and kayak and rowing fell hard.  And that is because to internal strife.  http://olympics.cbc.ca/news/article/canoe-kayak-canada-reeling-from-internal-strife-report.html

 

Thrilled that Penny is our closing ceremony flag bearer.  I predict DeGrasse will be leading the charge in Tokyo if he stays healthy and does damage at the Worlds next year and 2019. 

Thanks :) I have to try to remember all this data for Tokyo ;) but i <3 the researching involved. I really want to start noting actual conversion rates from world champions/cups etc and how that translates into medals etc. 

i read that article this morning. talk about a big cluster. 

[AimingforYoko]

16 hours ago, Nidratime said:

Wow U.S.A., you won a nice wad of medals while I was out this evening.

2016: United States 43 gold 37 silver 36 bronze 116 total

2012: United States 46 gold 28 silver 29 bronze 103 total

Didn't think they were going to match the Gold haul in London, but barring an epic collapse by the U.S. Men's B-Ball team (leading by 32 as I type) we will have 46 golds.

[Elsydeon]

So the US wins both the first gold medal of the games and the last. When was the last time one country did that?

[KenyaJ]

2 hours ago, Elsydeon said:

So the US wins both the first gold medal of the games and the last. When was the last time one country did that?

IDK, but I loved that stat when I saw it on Twitter. Also, the Guardian notes that the medal table looks different if you use you use the medals per capita table (congrats, Grenada!), but says: "Alternatively there’s the weighted medals per team size, in which Tajikstan is the winner, having a total of 4 (where gold = 4, silver = 2, bronze = 1) from a team of just 7 athletes. Great Britain would thus be 6th, 169 from 366 athletes, and the US an admittedly astonishing 2nd (282 from 554, tied with Kosovo and Jordan, both of whom had 4 from 8)."

No matter how you count the medals, I'm impressed by Team GB's continued success, happy for our Canadian and Dutch friends who have posted here, and super, super proud of Team USA for setting a record for most medals at a games on foreign soil.

[Kromm]

Amusing article on the subject of Medal Counts...

Where Texas would rank in Olympic medal count if it was its own country

The short version?  Eighth over-all in the world, and Third if you just count Gold Medals.

[SnideAsides]

18 hours ago, legaleagle53 said:

That still doesn't explain why your swimming team imploded so spectacularly.  I've been used to the (sort of) friendly rivalry between your teams and ours for so long that seeing Australia lose as consistently as it did during these games was in a way as disappointing to me as an American as I'm sure it must be to you as an Australian.

I think it's an ego thing. They don't have to beg for money or move to another country the way most of our other athletes do (in addition to Swimming Australia getting tens of millions more funding than any other Olympic sport, the team itself is sponsored by a mining billionaire; in comparison, the Paralympic team resorted to supermarket raffles, and a bunch of other sports barely got enough funding to cover the deposit for a suburban house), and they're one of only two sports where their Olympics qualifiers are shown on a commercial network (the other is soccer, which barely even counts), and the sport is idolised to the point that the incident in @katisha's article sounds exactly like something the swim team would do (a bunch of the athletes were holdovers from the London team, which pretty got a "we have to cover this in the media because swimmers, but boys will be boys" response to their abuse of sleeping pills during the games, and it's clear that despite their protestations they've learned about as much from the incident as Ryan Lochte has learned from being Ryan Lochte), and everyone sees themselves as the next Michael Phelps so tries to handle multiple events with mediocre results rather than trying to be the next Susie O'Neill and focus on being known for one single event (and as a result, the team was 25% smaller than in London).

[cocobeans]

On August 8, 2016 at 9:02 PM, Daisy said:

Canada won a bronze today. One a day. that's how Canada rolls. 

When I saw the medal counts everyday I would think of you, if I saw *your* medal I would sing Oh Canada :-)

Red, white, and blue American here, but I LOVE my hockey!  Lets Go Caps, thanks for your boy from Lloydminister, Braden Holtby

[kokapetl]

On 21 August 2016 at 11:53 AM, Bill1978 said:

The team achieved the goal I set them, get the same amount of gold as London as a minimum LOL. If I was the AOC I would be looking at improving our chances of medalling in the second week. It seems their view was the team sports will help us and didn't that backfire big time. I'm hoping the number of athletes that made track & field finals is a promising sign for Tokyo, and might encourage them to shift a bit of the swimming money towards athletics.

I also wonder why more money isn't thrown at those sports that while technically we aren't strong in - eg synchro swimming, rhythmic gymnastics, modern pentathlon - based upon the current way qualifications are done we are pretty much guaranteed reps at the Olympics due to the Oceania quota. I mean no matter what you think of the sport the fact that Synchro only got $200 000 for 4 years, is amazing. That is a lot of fundraising those girls need to do for costumes, participating in competitions, paying coaches, licensing of music etc. Who knows with a bit more money they just might become challengers to a minor medal eventually.

If we want to increase our medal count, we need to focus on the sports that give out a lots medals. And maybe start scouring primary schools for body types, like the Soviet Union did.  

This would be a waste of resources, but if we're spending a million dollars a person to lock up refugee children in detention centers...

Edited August 23, 2016 by Kokapetl

[MaKaM]

The per capita counts are misleading though because it assumes you have no more medal - worthy athletes than the quota allows. Using Women's Gymnastics as an extreme example, the US could have fielded 3 medal contending teams (one made solely of Texans) and if the all around and event finals didn't here 2 per country quotas, all 5 women could have made the all around and 3 swept the podium. The floor exercise and beam would have had at least 3 in it, all medal threats. If the 2 other imaginary US teams were there, another uneven bars medal threat, vault threat, and floor exercise reigning world medalist would have contended.  The women's hurdles that the US swept is an example where they couldn't have won more medals, but the reigning world record holder didn't even make the team.

 

Either way, it is interesting to see the ways to break it down. Number of medals vs delegation size would be interesting but team sports would skew that. It is also interesting to see that Russia did okay even without track and the US didn't snap up all their missed medals. A lot of countries seem to have shared the benefits of Russia being absent.