In the three and a half years I studied at the university (plus the five hours I took one morning to take an exam out of the 12 hours of required courses) I did not take a single math class. One of the advantages of having studied journalism and communications at Point Park University decades ago was that there was no math requirement.
There was a semester of probability and statistics in high school, although I probably couldn’t tell you much about what I learned.
Anyway, I didn’t need any of that to recognize a silly statistic when I see one.
And there is nothing more vacant than the Olympic medal table.
OLYMPIC GAMES MEDAL COUNT LIVE:
Overall table | Who is winning the Olympics? | Who has won the most gold?
It was omnipresent during the Paris Games, as it always is: on NBC during breaks in competition, even on the local evening news. It even appeared on my computer screen every morning when I logged on to start work.
And it remains the stupidest statistic in all of sports.
Do you think rebounding margin doesn’t matter anymore? Or RBIs? There’s been a revolution in the way math is used to evaluate athletes in almost every sport. So why do we keep hearing about medal counts that treat a single medal awarded to a person for two gymnastics routines the same as 18 medals awarded to football players who endure a schedule of six games in 16 days?
We started using calculators when I was in high school, almost half a century ago, but they were still a luxury. Now everyone has one on their phone. Even if someone is bad at math, the device does the hard part for us.
The International Olympic Committee does not award a single gold medal to the winning team in women’s basketball and ask them to display it at home as they see fit. Each of the 12 players on the list receives a medal, which they can keep, because they have earned it. In men’s field hockey, not one gold medal was awarded, but sixteen.
After the U.S. men won the basketball final against host France, everyone from Bam Adebayo to Derrick White received a gold medal, including Tyrese Haliburton. who joked on Twitter who got an ‘A’ on the class project to which he contributed little during Paris 2024.
There is no point in ignoring the number of athletes who leave the competition as medallists in favour of second-rate accounting.
That’s why, in 2008, I invented the DeCourcy Podium Count: so you can know the truth about what really happened in competition during each edition of the Summer Olympics. The DPC also doesn’t require an advanced degree in mathematical analysis. It simply establishes how many athletes received medals in ceremonies following the conclusion of their sports and reestablishes the logic of the process.
And using that formula, there was never a heated competition between the United States and China over who had the most gold medals.
By my calculations, the United States produced 110 gold medals, while China had 68. The United States won 86 silver medals, while China had 52. And the United States took home 94 bronze medals, while China had 34.
Those totals represent a huge increase for the United States compared to three years ago at the Tokyo Games, from 99 golds and 252 total medals to 110 golds and 290 total.
Team competition is devalued in the medal table
Team competition should not be devalued in the same way as simplistic medal counting (SMC). Team interaction is at the heart of sport, so we find fundamentally individual sports, such as gymnastics (team competition), swimming and athletics (relays), working to find ways to introduce that element into their programmes.
According to the SMC, the Netherlands has earned just 15 gold medals, but has won team gold in rowing, track and field, men’s team cycling, men’s 3×3, and men’s and women’s field hockey, bringing its DeCourcy podium score to 61, more than any other nation except the United States and China.
Do you think that when their teams return home they will feel that they produced only 15 gold medallists? That is not the reality.
Australia goes from 18 golds to 26 golds (thanks to some excellent swimming relays) and from 53 medals in total to 103. Great Britain’s performance is much better reflected using the DPC: 35 golds, 136 medals in total, versus simplistic counts of 14 golds and 65 in total largely due to excellence in the team rowing events.
The same is true for Spain, which left Paris with 36 gold medals thanks to the victories of the men’s football and women’s water polo teams, which are reduced to five in the simple count.
As the United States completed its victory over France in a thrilling final on Saturday, star forward Kevin Durant was described as the first athlete in men’s basketball to win four gold medals. Because that’s how many he has. He wasn’t labeled as someone who has had a hand in acquiring a single gold medal for his nation, or as someone who now owns .33 of a gold medal because he’s won .083 of them four times.
You can see how silly that is, right?
It’s time for DeCourcy’s podium count to become the standard medal count for the Olympics.
It’s about time, honestly.
