http://news.bbc.co.uk/sport2/hi/olympics/medals_table/default.stm
China lead the table as expected. Its gold medal's tally was way ahead of others. Another surprise in table was TGB or team great britain. 4th place with 19 golds is excellent performance.
Another interesting observation is the number of medals scored by well known sporting countries, like South Africa, Croatia, Brazil. Brazil was 23rd in table and Brazilian president expressed worries about it. South Africa was miserable, finished with just 1 silver. Even country like Portugal was just 1 place above India in the table. So why is it so? Croatia which seems to produce so many talented tennis stars, footballers, is languishing at 57th place. Why can't SA, which performs so well in different team sports like Cricket, Rugby, Football and at the same time produces golfers, surfers can't have more medals.
In my opinion, Olympic medals table is biased and does not represent the sporting talent of a country. Some of the sports have too many medals, like Swimming, Shooting, Weightlifting. Agreed that Butterfly race is different from Backstroke and so on. But should swimming have so many medals. Imagine Phelps having a single medal in swimming and then how would medal's table look like? American medals will be depraved of 1/4th of their medals. Russia on the other hand, in spite of having so many ladies Tennis star, have to settle for a gold and a silver, just because there is single gold in Ladies Tennis. So is the case with many other sports.
So, if a country decides to focus on a single sports, which has many medals, it can perform well in Olympics. Take example of China. Chinese know that they can do well in, say, Gymnastics. They know they are good in it, so they will focus on that. And why not? It has got 12 golds and China claimed 9 of them this Olympic.
So Olympic medal's tally is more about knowing which sports can fetch you medals and just focusing on them. Overall sporting talent of country may or may not matter. That's why Olympic medal's tally is distorted and not true reflection of sporting prowess of countries.
posted by ninad @ 11:46 pm
1 Comments:
Totally agree with your observations...I believe that Micheal Johnson or Usain Bolt too would have 8 gold medals in a single Olympics if they would have to run the 100m/200m forwards, backwards,sideways...
At the end most of the races were for same distances and the style for swimming should not be considered.
Also the one fact that should be highlighted...China were very dominant in non-athletic sports...However USA did very well in most of the sports...
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