Last week I was reading about the Olympic medal count I found myself unhappy with the way U.S. media reports Olympic medal counts, valuing any medal - gold, silver, or bronze - the same.

Here is Yahoo Sports' Olympic medal count as of 9:00 a.m. EST last Thursday.
Top ten countries in raw medal count
35 China
34 United States
16 Australia
16 South Korea
15 France
14 Russia
13 Italy
11 Germany
11 Japan
7 North Korea

So I decided to run some numbers to come up with alternative (and hopefully more accurate) ways to show a country's Olympic performance. Here are the top ten countries in a weighted medal count. (Gold is valued at 3, Silver=2, Bronze=1.) Despite being nearly tied in the raw count, as of last Thursday, China had more valuable medals than the U.S., and this disparity is revealed in the weighted count. By the way, way to go for the Koreans. The J household represent!

Top ten in weighted medal count
87 China
63 United States
35 South Korea
30 Australia
29 Italy
28 Russia
26 France
25 Germany
24 Japan
13 Great Britain

But perhaps the top countries do so well because they have a larger base of citizens from which to choose. So I divided the # of weighted medals by each country's population (in millions) and here are the rankings. Note that the U.S., China, and Korea drop down the list.

Ranking by weighted medals per million capita
1 Mongolia
2 Georgia
3 Australia
4 Armenia
5 Slovenia
6 Azerbaijan
7 Cuba
8 Slovakia
9 Switzerland
10 Finland
.
.
.
27 U.S.
35 S. Korea
39 China

Another thoughts was that countries do well because they have more money to finance training. So I divided the # of weighted medals by each country's GDP (in billions of USD) and here we go. Way to go Zimbabwe. and Borat's people. And the U.S. drops almost to the bottom.

Ranking by weighted medals per $B GDP
1 Zimbabwe
2 Mongolia
3 Kyrgyzstan
4 Georgia
5 Armenia
6 Togo
7 Tajikistan
8 Azerbaijan
9 Slovakia
10 Kazakhstan
.
.
.
19 S. Korea
21 China
44 U.S.

So what does this teach us, class? Not much! Except that last week the U.S. had a lot of bronze medals, I have a lot of time on my hands, and can still crunch numbers after an entire summer of brain stagnation.

The fine print!
Rankings are out of 51 participating countries listed Yahoo Sports as of 8/14/08.
Population is 2008 estimate, from Yahoo
GDP is from the World Bank via Wikipedia