How to Become No. 1

Every country seems to be obliged to inform people of their performance in Olympics ("Naughty Korea" may be an exception though), hence medal ranking is unavoidable for media. But there is only one country that can top the list, therefore how to be that one becomes a challenge to every participator. In general there are two ways of ranking: either by the number of gold medals or total medals. China, who values gold medals much more than silver or bronze ones always go with the former. The US followed the same rule until 2008 when China won more gold medals and decided to rank by the total number of medals during Beijing Olympics.

London Olympics are somehow more interesting. China topped the list by gold medals for the first few days, but the US won more total medals. Thus most US media ranked by total medals instead of gold medals. But China soon started to collect more silver and bronze medals, while Phelps created a new history as a gold medalist. The ranking was reversed: the US surpassed China in gold medals but ranked 2nd by total medals. An interesting switch happened between US media and their Chinese counterparts with US media adopting a gold-medal ranking while China starting to use a total-medal one.

If two countries have exactly the same amount of gold medals, how will you rank them - by total medals or silver medals? Chinese newspapers and the US ones offered different answers to make their own country No.1 on the list. A more creative ranking was adopted by Yahoo which calculated the number of  "historic cumulative" medals since the first modern Olympics in 1896 to guarantee US' No.1 position.

China and the US are not alone. Other countries are also trying all sorts of means to rank higher. One way is to find allies. European countries believe that an union, though functioning poorly in addressing economic crisis, can work well on sports. So for the first time in history, we have EU on the top of the tally with 52 gold medals and 160 medals in all, leaving the US and China far behind. (See above) Unfortunately we can't find "ASEAN", "NAFTA", "CARICOM" or "SADC" on this list, which I believe should be included to make the comparison fair enough. Similarly, an Australian newspaper was amazed by their neighbor's performance in London and decided to establish an "Aus-Zealand" to squeeze Australia into Top 10. (See right) I wonder if they had asked New Zealand for the permission to do so, but I guess kiwi were probably not happy with this, that's why we soon find a new list offered by Australians who abandoned all traditional ways but ranked by silver medals. With 12 silver medals and 20 medals in all, Australia ranks No.4 on the new list. (See below)

That's not the end of the story. We soon find out there is a good reason for New Zealand to reject the free rider as they have their own way of putting Kiwi top on the list: they rank by medals per capita. With a population of less than 4.5 million and 9 medals from London, New Zealand well deserves the No.1 position on the medal tally.

There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies, and statistics. (Source: Mark Twain) It is interesting to see how creative people can be when they play with numbers, which also reminds me of the headache brought by dozens of different ways to calculate carbon emissions and allocate quotas across countries. But no longer trying to rank lower on the list, now they're competing for top positions instead. London Olympics have just passed the half-way to the end, we have good reasons to expect more novels standards such as medals per GDP or number of medal winners (football, I'm talking about you), or comprehensive indicators like "weighted" medals. When we're enjoying athletes fighting for new records of their own or the human kind, we should be grateful for these rankers who brainstorm for new ways of entertaining us.