In swimming, the US broadcast made it seem like the US and Australia were close, with the battle for the most golds coming down to the last race.

Because it was close, with the battle for most golds coming down to the last race.

But the score shows a different picture, one where the US smashed the Australians during the course of the week-long meet

The score? Which score? This arbitrary score you’ve made up? Why not award golds a million points and say you’ve obliterated the Aussies? There’s not much point in Australia competing anymore, considering you’ve got 20 trillion more points.

Why does this shit constantly come from Americans? You did really well! Why do you have to create a system where you “smashed” an opponent? So many of you seem to be such sore winners.

No country wins or loses the Olympics. The medal table is unofficial, just as whatever you’ve created here is. It’s as arbitrary and pointless as all the other tables created on this sub ranking countries by population, wealth or coffee intake.

Why 5-3-1? Why not 3-2-1? Or 10-5-1?

It’s all arbitrary. And it’s so preoccupied with comparing a gold to a bronze it completely ignores the fact you’re comparing shot put to sailing.

All the medals are doing is ranking the best three people in a sport’s discipline. Countries obviously use them to gauge relative success, but that’s all it is: finger in the air ballpark of whether the money they’re spending is paying off. It’s not meant to be a way for someone to say they won the Olympics. That’s why the medal table is UNOFFICIAL. There is no unbiased, fair or accurate way to compare success across wildly different disciplines.

I really hope no one tells him. I’d love to see his face drop when he sees it’s 3x as far.

That’s my thinking on it. We were third in total medals behind America and China - that doesn’t seem like a decline to me. As you say, the margins are very fine! 3 or 4 more golds and we’d be unanimous in our success. And some golds that could have ”easily” happened, didn’t.

Like you point out, time will tell. To me It just shows how far we’ve come that 7th place feels like an underperformance. It was only 28 years ago that we finished 36th! A single gold medal, behind North Korea, Ethiopia, and Kazakhstan.

Only in terms of golds. Our total medal count was exceptional - we just struggled a bit with that conversion. I don’t know how much of that is just bad luck or evidence of a decline in funding/training/talent.

Why are you cheering for people to beat China?

But most people saw raygun’s dance and (probably wrongly) thought “I could do that, today” not “if I trained for 6 months, I could dance better than her”.

There is undeniably a difference in public perception of privilege too. Ray gun would have had more sympathy and less derision had she not been from a wealthy, sporting nation.

They aren’t very comparable though. Very few people have run a sub 4 hour marathon - most people have danced badly. Someone running slowly isn’t inherently funny. Someone dancing badly is. An elite runner can get a bad time, an elite gymnast a bad score - but with the breaking it didn’t feel like she was having an off day, it felt like that was her doing her thing.

To be honest, the court of public opinion is very fickle and not very rational. People can hate one person for doing a thing, and completely ignore another person for doing the same thing.

I don’t think you’ve read/understood the criteria they’ve used.