Tweet
North Korea tops alt medals table
By JOHN LEICESTER, AP Olympics Columnist
9 hours, 34 minutes ago
Buzz Up
Print
Russia's Elena Isinbayeva cele…
AP - Aug 18, 10:41 am EDT
Olympics Gallery
Related Coverage
Latest news from Beijing
BEIJING (AP)—Don’t believe the Olympic medals table. Runaway leaders China and the United States are not the best performers of these games, not even close.
No, by far the most successful of the 204 teams is …. North Korea. Break out the hammers and sickles; let the goose-stepping celebrations begin.
That, at least, is the result you get by factoring the size of countries’ economies into the medal count—in short, calculating not just the number of medals won but also how poor or rich the countries are that won them.
Doing it that way puts the major economies down a peg or 20, and propels economic minnows like Mongolia, Armenia and North Korea toward the top.
Thank Bill Mitchell, an economics professor in Australia, for doing the math.
A caveat: Mitchell does have a teeny ax to grind. He hates the Olympics (“the jingoism is unbelievable. It’s gone so much beyond the idea of an amateur pursuit, where all is fair and you do it for the love and run your heart out and you shake hands”). He also hates that the games went to China (“I can’t stand repression of individual freedoms”) and thinks that Western media are giving China’s communist authorities a free ride, “covering the games as if China is a darling and a clean-skin and that’s just total nonsense.”
But from his base at the University of Newcastle, in Australia’s state of New South Wales, he is having a whole bunch of fun crunching Olympic numbers.
As Mitchell rightly points out, the “official” tables—ranking nations simply by golds, silvers and bronzes won—do not take into account how big and rich they are, how many people they have, how big their Olympic teams are, or factors such as standards of living or education.
Given those deficiencies, Mitchell’s take is that national preening—or misery—based on medal standings is shortsighted.
“I can’t stand the sort of big bragging boasting of very wealthy countries who have got better nutrition, better everything and they seem to want to beguile you into this fanatic nationalism that they are better,” he said.
Others have been taking a second look at the numbers, too. And even the “official” table is a matter of disagreement.
The Beijing Games’ Chinese organizers rank nations according to the number of golds, not overall medals, won. That method puts China on top, with 46 golds as of Thursday night, with the United States a distant second on 29.
American broadcaster NBC, on the other hand, ranks countries by overall medals on its Web site. That put the United States ahead with 95, to China’s 83. But NBC is open to a second opinion: Along with its medals standings it is also running an online poll asking readers whether gold or total medals matter most.
Officially, the International Olympic Committee says it’s not in the ranking game. Medal tables on its Web site “are displayed for information only,” it says. Those rankings put the premium on gold.
And then there was this headline Thursday on the Web site of The New Zealand Herald: “We are second in medals table—behind Slovenia.”
To get there, it calculated medals per capita—9 divided by 4.17 million New Zealanders. By that method, it had Jamaica third and Australia fourth. The newspaper said it “wanted to see if New Zealand hadn’t done a little better than its official—and undeniably respectable” 17th spot on the total medals table at the start of competition Thursday.
Mitchell, meanwhile, has been recalculating the standings since 2000 with the help of a number-crunching computer program. His aim, he says, is simply to provide a different perspective and to get people thinking about how factors like wealth play into the equation of Olympic success. He calls it his “Alternative Olympic Games Medal Tally.”
Mitchell figures that gold, silver and bronze medals do not have equal worth. So he assigns gold a value of 1, silver two-thirds of that, or 0.666, and bronze just one-third, or 0.333. So a gold, a silver and a bronze would together be worth a numerical value of 1.99.
Then, he takes the size of a country’s economy, measured by gross domestic product in dollars, and divides it by the numerical value he has assigned for the medals won by that nation’s team.
“When you do that you get very interesting things,” Mitchell said. “You get North Korea on top. What’s the expression—punching well above your weight?”
Time for another caveat: On a medals per capita count, North Korea is far from exceptional: 43rd out of 79 countries listed, behind the United States, which is 39th. And the numbers don’t account for political systems. As a totalitarian Stalinist state that pampers its communist elite and locks its enemies in gulags, North Korea can channel food and resources to a lucky few athletes to make itself look better on the world’s sporting stage.
But Mongolia, a fledgling democracy, is doing well on Mitchell’s economy/medals standings, fourth as of Thursday. Jamaica was third.
“I love reggae so I love Jamaica being No. 3, and who’s ever heard of Mongolia? And Georgia just got invaded and they are No. 5,” said the economist. On a dollar-for-dollar basis, some of the smaller, poorer countries “are better able to generate success.”
The United States was near the bottom, 65th out of the 79 countries ranked. Japan was 69th, Germany 56th, France 52nd and China 36th.
The Aussies can take comfort. In golds and total medals, they were trailing Britain, their former colonial masters, the dreaded “winging poms” in Aussie parlance.
But in Mitchell’s calculations, the Aussies get the last laugh, still well ahead of Britain in medals per capita and in relative economic terms.
In the Olympic game of one-upmanship, you take comfort where you can.
On the Web:
Mitchell’s Web site: http://www.billmitchell.org/sport/medal— tally— 2008
John Leicester is an Olympics columnist for The Associated Press. Write to him at jleicester(at)ap.org
By JOHN LEICESTER, AP Olympics Columnist
9 hours, 34 minutes ago
Buzz Up
Russia's Elena Isinbayeva cele…
AP - Aug 18, 10:41 am EDT
Olympics Gallery
Related Coverage
Latest news from Beijing
BEIJING (AP)—Don’t believe the Olympic medals table. Runaway leaders China and the United States are not the best performers of these games, not even close.
No, by far the most successful of the 204 teams is …. North Korea. Break out the hammers and sickles; let the goose-stepping celebrations begin.
That, at least, is the result you get by factoring the size of countries’ economies into the medal count—in short, calculating not just the number of medals won but also how poor or rich the countries are that won them.
Doing it that way puts the major economies down a peg or 20, and propels economic minnows like Mongolia, Armenia and North Korea toward the top.
Thank Bill Mitchell, an economics professor in Australia, for doing the math.
A caveat: Mitchell does have a teeny ax to grind. He hates the Olympics (“the jingoism is unbelievable. It’s gone so much beyond the idea of an amateur pursuit, where all is fair and you do it for the love and run your heart out and you shake hands”). He also hates that the games went to China (“I can’t stand repression of individual freedoms”) and thinks that Western media are giving China’s communist authorities a free ride, “covering the games as if China is a darling and a clean-skin and that’s just total nonsense.”
But from his base at the University of Newcastle, in Australia’s state of New South Wales, he is having a whole bunch of fun crunching Olympic numbers.
As Mitchell rightly points out, the “official” tables—ranking nations simply by golds, silvers and bronzes won—do not take into account how big and rich they are, how many people they have, how big their Olympic teams are, or factors such as standards of living or education.
Given those deficiencies, Mitchell’s take is that national preening—or misery—based on medal standings is shortsighted.
“I can’t stand the sort of big bragging boasting of very wealthy countries who have got better nutrition, better everything and they seem to want to beguile you into this fanatic nationalism that they are better,” he said.
Others have been taking a second look at the numbers, too. And even the “official” table is a matter of disagreement.
The Beijing Games’ Chinese organizers rank nations according to the number of golds, not overall medals, won. That method puts China on top, with 46 golds as of Thursday night, with the United States a distant second on 29.
American broadcaster NBC, on the other hand, ranks countries by overall medals on its Web site. That put the United States ahead with 95, to China’s 83. But NBC is open to a second opinion: Along with its medals standings it is also running an online poll asking readers whether gold or total medals matter most.
Officially, the International Olympic Committee says it’s not in the ranking game. Medal tables on its Web site “are displayed for information only,” it says. Those rankings put the premium on gold.
And then there was this headline Thursday on the Web site of The New Zealand Herald: “We are second in medals table—behind Slovenia.”
To get there, it calculated medals per capita—9 divided by 4.17 million New Zealanders. By that method, it had Jamaica third and Australia fourth. The newspaper said it “wanted to see if New Zealand hadn’t done a little better than its official—and undeniably respectable” 17th spot on the total medals table at the start of competition Thursday.
Mitchell, meanwhile, has been recalculating the standings since 2000 with the help of a number-crunching computer program. His aim, he says, is simply to provide a different perspective and to get people thinking about how factors like wealth play into the equation of Olympic success. He calls it his “Alternative Olympic Games Medal Tally.”
Mitchell figures that gold, silver and bronze medals do not have equal worth. So he assigns gold a value of 1, silver two-thirds of that, or 0.666, and bronze just one-third, or 0.333. So a gold, a silver and a bronze would together be worth a numerical value of 1.99.
Then, he takes the size of a country’s economy, measured by gross domestic product in dollars, and divides it by the numerical value he has assigned for the medals won by that nation’s team.
“When you do that you get very interesting things,” Mitchell said. “You get North Korea on top. What’s the expression—punching well above your weight?”
Time for another caveat: On a medals per capita count, North Korea is far from exceptional: 43rd out of 79 countries listed, behind the United States, which is 39th. And the numbers don’t account for political systems. As a totalitarian Stalinist state that pampers its communist elite and locks its enemies in gulags, North Korea can channel food and resources to a lucky few athletes to make itself look better on the world’s sporting stage.
But Mongolia, a fledgling democracy, is doing well on Mitchell’s economy/medals standings, fourth as of Thursday. Jamaica was third.
“I love reggae so I love Jamaica being No. 3, and who’s ever heard of Mongolia? And Georgia just got invaded and they are No. 5,” said the economist. On a dollar-for-dollar basis, some of the smaller, poorer countries “are better able to generate success.”
The United States was near the bottom, 65th out of the 79 countries ranked. Japan was 69th, Germany 56th, France 52nd and China 36th.
The Aussies can take comfort. In golds and total medals, they were trailing Britain, their former colonial masters, the dreaded “winging poms” in Aussie parlance.
But in Mitchell’s calculations, the Aussies get the last laugh, still well ahead of Britain in medals per capita and in relative economic terms.
In the Olympic game of one-upmanship, you take comfort where you can.
On the Web:
Mitchell’s Web site: http://www.billmitchell.org/sport/medal— tally— 2008
John Leicester is an Olympics columnist for The Associated Press. Write to him at jleicester(at)ap.org
Comment