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Since there is some debate about the best way to measure who won the Olympics (correct answer: “We all did”), I thought I would prepare the results using several different methods so that various countries could claim to be the winners.

Most of the debate, at least here in the USA, centers around do only golds count (China won) or do all medals count (USA won). The seemingly official method is to count by golds, but there are some other ways.

Since there are too much data to put into one post, I’ll summarize the results in this post and also point to another page that contains the unsummarized data.

Summary: Panama or India won the 2008 Olympic games

If the official ranking is by gold medals won, the ranking should be normalized by how many athletes competed to get those golds. Some other methods are to adjust the ranking by the countries’ GDP, population, or area.

A country’s economic ranking (by GDP) is the best indicator of how well that country will do in the Olympics. Of the top ten Olympic gold winners, eight of them were in the top ten GDPs. The other two winners were still in the top twenty GDPs.

But I prefer to normalize the Olympic rankings by athletes or, as they are sometimes called, delegates. How many contestants did a country send to win medals? And how many medals did they win? It’s more of an efficiency rating, but I think it is better than comparing medals to the general population.

I also prefer to use a weighted ranking (gold = 5 points, silver = 3 points, bronze = 1 point) and rank the countries by points, not by gold medals and not by total medals. It is interesting to note that the ranking of countries by gold medal has the same result as ranking them by points. The points system provides a clearer picture of the order, as there are a number of countries that did not win a gold medal. If the ranking is by gold medal only, then those countries receive the same rank. A points system provides for finer resolution of the ranking.

When one adjusts the points total by number of athletes sent to the Olympics, India is the winner. They were the only country to earn more than one point per athlete or, as I ranked them, less than one athlete per point.

For the complete data, please view the charts on the 2008 Olympics Results page.

The current Olympics in Beijing, China, are interesting to me because of the medal count. The official method of listing the winning countries is by order of gold medals, not by total medals won. This is interesting because out of the last few Olympics, the total medal winner has been the same as the gold medal winner.

This Olympics is different, because China is winning the gold medal count and the USA is winning the total medal count. I thought I would do some research on this, and you, the reader, get to benefit from that. How? I don’t know yet.

At first I wondered if it had to do with China’s being the host country. Some may argue that the host does receive favorable treatment and scoring, but I looked at the trend and I think it just has to do with China’s effort to improve themselves in international competition.

First up, China’s medal count trend. Look at how both the gold medals won and total medals won have been increasing from effectively zero several Olympics ago. Now they’re one of the leaders.

Next up, China’s increase in gold medals trend. Look at how their percentage of medals has been changing toward more golds and less of the other medals. I have extrapolated the data and found that, if the current trend continues, all the medals that China wins will be golds by the year 2028. They won’t even bother with the silver or bronze medals. If the Olympic ranking system goes for gold, not total medals, then that is how countries should play – for the gold. China is the only country whose gold medal count is more than half of its total medal count.

Don’t worry though. Even though all of China’s medals will be gold by 2028, they won’t win all the events that year. So there will still be gold medals available for a while. I also checked out how long it will take for China to win all the events, and that should occur in the year 2108, at a venue still to be decided by the IOC.

So either China will end up with all the medals, or their rate of medal winning will level off at some point. If they haven’t claimed all the medals by 2108, then you can find me and I will try to revise this post with the correct information.

“Also if anyone competes as an athlete, he does not win the prize unless he competes according to the rules.”
– 2 Timothy 2:5

What makes a game a game and a sport a sport?

Games are something that people can do for fun. Sports are not. Track and Field is generally a sport, because you don’t have people playing a pick-up game of pole vault.

They’re called the Olympic Games. There are a lot of games in there, but there are some real sports too. Swimming is mostly a sport – who swims the butterfly for fun? But diving could be considered game-ish.

Things that require subjective judging are usually games, as sports have clear and obvious scores. If you have the fastest time or longest distance or whatever, then you’re the winner. Watching some of the Olympic events, I wondered what would happen if we applied subjective scoring to other events. What prompted that was the interminable wait after some of the gymnastics events until the gymnast’s score was determined.

What if that same method was applied to something else, such as the 100-yard dash? Okay, officially it is known as the 100-meter dash, but we all know they just renamed the event to make it sound internationalish. Anyway, what if the race finished, but we had to wait until they added individual level-of-difficulty to everyone’s time, and then they subtracted some deductions for things like bad form? That would make for a very tedious competition and would not be very entertaining. Hmm… now that I think about it some more, that sounds a lot like the BCS formula.

But not all things that are objective are sports. Table tennis has obvious scoring, but it is a game. People play it for fun – the same with volleyball. Plus volleyball is too much fun to be a pure sport. Sports are things that are not fun in and of themselves, like marathons. Sure the event of the marathon may be fun, with live bands and people cheering. But the running part of the marathon, without those other things, is no fun.

“Everyone who competes in the games exercises self-control in all things. They then do it to receive a perishable wreath, but we an imperishable.”
– 1 Corinthians 9:25

Since the football season is starting (and there was much rejoicing), I thought it would be appropriate to note some similarities between football and families with small children.

The first correlation is not specific to football, but to any college sport. A few weeks ago we checked into the local junior kindergarten/pre-kindergarten/young fives program. Our son has a birthday that is late in the year, but it is before the official cut-off date for enrollment in school. The principal of the school said not to think of having the extra year as holding back your child. She said to think of it as red-shirting your child. That makes it sound a lot better.

The second correlation has to do with the number of kids in the family. This correlation fits with fewer sports, but is still not unique to football. We were talking with someone who has four children. When he heard that we are expecting our third child, his comment was that we would have to switch from man-to-man to zone defense. Ah yes, our play-calling will have to change.

“So there was much rejoicing in that city.”
– Acts 8:8

Ah, football talk in July… Unfortunately, it has to do with Brett Favre’s unretiring. I had hoped this would not happen, and now it is time for another warning: don’t do it, Brett.

Stay retired, be a man of your word.  How do you want to be remembered?  You’re in a good spot now, having taken the Packers to the playoffs in your final year.  Leave it at that.

“But above all, my brethren, do not swear, either by heaven or by earth or with any other oath; but your yes is to be yes, and your no, no, so that you may not fall under judgment.”
– James 5:12

At the cancer walk mentioned in the previous post, I saw another interesting sight. As we were walking to the main gathering area before the race started (it was officially a race, but most participants were walking to raise money for cancer research, not running to win the race that day), I saw some people sitting on the curb, smoking their cigarettes.

It seemed rather out of place – smokers at a cancer event. The first thing that came to mind was “an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure.” On the other hand, the focus of the event was not lung cancer, so I suppose they weren’t totally incongruous. But there are lung cancer races.  I guess those races would work about the same – some people actually running and the rest just participating.

“A third of mankind was killed by these three plagues, by the fire and the smoke and the brimstone which proceeded out of their mouths.”
– Revelation 9:18

At a recent cancer walk event, I noticed there were various shirts. Some corporate groups would have matching shirts, some families would have matching shirts, etc. Many of them were as expected, but some were quite memorable. The one that I thought was most clever is pictured below. It was from a group of some sort, and this is what one saw as one walked behind someone wearing the shirt.

I was disappointed that they highlighted “cure” in the search. They should have let people find the cure. I suppose there are other words that they let people find on their own.

“You will seek Me and find {Me} when you search for Me with all your heart.”
– Jeremiah 29:13