Olympic Gold Rush

Even though it took a few days to get into a rhythm, Vancouver 2010 delivered the goods. A dozen different events, two weeks of non-stop competition, human drama, funny moments, athletes wearing their countries' colors (or, in a few cases, bizarre colorful patterns resembling a blind man's rendition of their flags): the atmosphere was definitely there and it was contagious.

It couldn't be any different. I mean, it's the Olympics, baby! For a sports fan, that's as big as it gets... well, sort of. The World Cup and the Summer Olympics are definitely bigger, but this winter stuff is pretty neat too. More importantly, it has that rare and special allure that draws people even if they have no real connection with the competitors; the kind of appeal that makes a guy from a tropical country that only sent a handful of people to British Columbia, none of whom with any chance whatsoever at a medal, watch women's Curling at 2 in the morning.

Still, as thrilling as the actual events might be, one of the most entertaining moments of the Games - winter or summer - takes place after the athletes step down from the podium. That's when they update the Medal Table - you know, the one in which countries are ranked according to the amount of gold, silver and bronze hardware their respective athletes bring home. The table is just a great idea: it's exciting to follow and it ties all the events together in one big contest.

However, despite being an Olympic tradition by now, these rankings are not official. The brains behind the International Olympic Committee, claiming that each each event is independent and an end on its own, refuse to acknowledge the very existence of a medals table. In a way, it's much like those annoying PC parents who pretend not to know the score on their kids' soccer games, even though everybody knows exactly who's winning.

The downside of this stupid policy is that, well, the rankings are not official. Supposedly, by playing dumb, the IOC was hoping to squash the idea of a medals table altogether - which just won't happen. So, instead, what they create is room for controversy in what would otherwise be a great way to measure Olympic success.

I first spotted signs of trouble in 2008, during the Beijing games. A good part of the North-American media, defying what had always been one of those unspoken international rules, decided to base its table on the total amount of medals of each country, as opposed to the traditional gold-over-silver-over-bronze system everybody else was using.

A more cynical person could say that this newfound love for silver and bronze was somehow related to the fact that the US, for the first time since the end of the Cold War, were losing the first place in the rankings. China beat them in the gold column, 51 to 36, but the Americans still had the upper hand in total medals (110 against only 100 of the Chinese), so their new criteria would suddenly put them back on top.

Whether or not these conspiracy theories are justified is of no consequence, mostly because nobody else bought this nonsense. As far as the rest of the world was concerned, it wasn't even an issue: the Chinese had more gold, they were first and that was it.

But then Vancouver 2010 came and the plot thickened. This time the US finished third, behind Canada and Germany. Oh, Canada! Americans would rather die than admitting they finished behind their neighbors from the north at anything, so everybody just knew, even before it happened, that they would hang on to that same lame system like a starving man hangs on to a piece of moldy bread.

Sadly, even though anyone can immediately see that their table is inherently unfair and that their motives are questionable at best, those bastards have enough pull to eventually sway people their way. Thus, before this schism turns into yet another metric-system-type debacle that annoys the hell out of everybody, it is time to standardize the Olympics Medals Table.

It goes without saying that the starting point should be that gold is worth more than silver, and silver is worth more than bronze. None of this total of medals crap. Of course it must be thrilling to score some silver or some bronze at the Olympics, but nobody on their right mind would ever agree that it is the same as winning the gold. Not even a biased American journalist.

I would agree, however, that stepping on that podium is a great achievement no matter what, so we can't really dismiss its importance either. And, even though I'm a big fan of the simplicity of the traditional table, it can be occasionally unfair. Take, for instance, Cuba at the 2008 Beijing games: it won 24 medals (2-11-11) and yet, because it had one less gold, it finished behind Georgia, which had only 6 (3-0-3). One gold medal against 11 silver and 8 bronze ones seems a bit too much.

Just like with the bullshit in the American table, anyone can instinctively see the superiority of Cuba's results there, and it would be hard to argue against a criterion that would account for this type of situation. So colors should matter, but perhaps this "gold trumps all" thing isn't such a great idea after all.

The solution could be some sort of points system, where each medal is worth x amount of points. The main complication in that case would be deciding how many points should be attributed to each medal, something that would undoubtedly unravel into one of those heated and never-ending sport debates, but I suppose that's when that IOC authority would come in handy.

In any case, it doesn't really matter exactly where the line is drawn, as long as the scale reflects the true importance of a first place (something the traditional table does quite well). It needs to be a really skewed ratio, like 15 points for gold, 3 for silver and only 1 for bronze. I mean, imagine you won some Olympic gold: would you trade it for only 2 or 3 silver medals? Or maybe for 10 bronze medals? I wouldn't.

(If we apply those values to the Cuba-Georgia case, Cuba would score 74 points [2 x 15 + 11 x 3 + 11 x 1] against Georgia's 48 [3 x 15 + 0 x 3 + 3 x 1], which looks about right. Order would be restored and we would be well on our way to a fair table.)

There should be, however, a couple of additional provisions in this system. See, in the Montreal Olympic Park they built, after the games were over, a monument honoring all the countries that won a gold medal there. The monument itself is actually is quite simple, just a bunch of flags arranged in a circle and a plaque, but nevertheless a symbol of how important it is to get at least one first place. It's like joining a brotherhood: here are all those who made it to the mountain top.

So this should be tweak number one: you need at least one gold medal to be ranked above a country that has a gold medal; and one silver to surpass a country with at least one silver. I don't care how many times you came in second or third, if you didn't win any event you can't say you did better than a country that did. You're not in the brotherhood. Moreover, would you trade your only gold for any amount of silver or bronze? Didn't think so.

Tweak number two should address an even more pressing issue: how on Earth can a medal in events such as Women's under 48kg Weightlifting or 200m Butterfly Swimming count as much as the ones from, say, basketball, football or volleyball? A team of several people working in unison throughout an entire tournament is the same as one dude swimming funny for a couple of laps? Really?

What bothers me is how athletes like Michael Phelps - amazing as they are and as entertaining as it is to watch them - can throw the entire table out of whack by racking up 3 medals a day in several different events just because their thing only takes a few minutes, while equally dominant football of basketball players wouldn't even get that same opportunity because their tournament takes 2 weeks. Or, even worse, how they have all these distances and weight limits in a lot of different sports, each one of them worth a medal, but we don't get to see stuff like basketball under 2 meters, football 7-a-side or one-handed volleyball.

In that sense, it is definitely unfair to compare the achievements of entire groups of athletes with those of individuals, especially considering how these individuals are often broken down into several subcategories to reflect different performance levels (e.g. weight limits) or really specific skills (like swimming belly-up). That is something that ultimately softens the absolute terms under which teams have to compete and, simply put, is a double standard. There's only one winning team, but there's a whole bunch of fastest runners, fastest swimmers and best judo wrestlers; one for each situation. And that, for ranking purposes, is a freaking nightmare.

Therefore, unless you consider swimming (34 total gold medals), weightlifting (15), wrestling (18), judo (14) and even diving (8) that much more relevant than the aforementioned teams sports - all of which combine for merely 6 podiums (8 if you count beach volleyball) - you can't say that this is a system that accurately measures the Olympic success of a country.

This, however, is a tricky problem to solve. First, the temptation of giving more weight to the most popular sports should be avoided - even though it would make for a very interesting table. The Olympics are about all sports, not just the cool ones and, in the end, any criteria based on popularity of would merely reflect individual preferences, meaning yet another never-ending argument - not the most decisive of steps if the goal is a standardized table.

Moreover, there is also the danger of concocting a formula so complex that would kill one of the best features of the traditional table: the simplicity that allows anybody to follow the medals race. If we start to compensate for things such as the length of the tournament or the number of different categories or whatever, we risk creating, instead of a medals table, something akin to the FIFA rankings: a process so confusing that only a half a dozen people in the world would even know how that final number of points was reached.

Nevertheless, there should be a way of rewarding those who excel in events that require the combined efforts of several athletes, even if for no reason other than the necessity of having that many people performing at the highest level to win a medal.

Thankfully, there is a straightforward enough solution: for ranking purposes, the value of medals in team sports (including relays and doubles) should be equivalent to the number of athletes competing in each squad. That way, for instance, a medal in football would count as 11, one in basketball would count as 5, one in the 4 x 100 meters relay would count as 4 and so on. After all, we count the medals of the "swimming teams", "track and field teams" and all the other "teams" individually, so why shouldn't the actual teams receive the same treatment?

It could definitely work: just multiply each medal by the value attributed to its color and then by the number of people who won it (reserves and alternates not included). Don't forget the brotherhood rule and voilá! Although not perfect, such a system would correct most of the flaws in the traditional table without becoming a statistical monster, preserving the fun of watching the Olympic gold rush while bringing the rankings closer to what most people would consider important.

Now, if only someone could please forward this to the IOC, it would be awesome.