To deal with this difference, some people will determine the rankings by dividing a country's medal total by the country's population size or GDP. In at the Athens Summer Olympics, the US won the most gold medals with 11 but Greece won the most medals overall with Another instance was in the Stockholm Summer Olympics where again the US had the most gold medals, 25, but Sweden had the most overall medals, Another noteworthy occurrence was at the Tokyo Olympics where the US won with 36 gold medals but the Soviet Union won more overall medals.
Most recently in , China had the most gold medals, 51, and the United States had the most overall medals, Michael Phelps , a swimmer, has the most Olympic medals of any Olympic athlete with The nearest competitor is gymnast Larisa Latynina, who has 18 Olympic medals. Phelps also leads with the most Olympic Gold medals 23 with Latyina behind him again with 9. Latyina is a former Soviet Union gymnast who competed in three games between and The modern Olympics didn't start until In this year, the winners received an olive wreath and a silver medal.
It wasn't until that first, second, and third places received gold, silver, and bronze medals respectively. Since then, this trend has continued. The hosting country will design the medals to be given to the winners. The IOC has to approve the final design though. When you rank the total medal counts of the countries based on the population size the results are substantially different. The most successful countries by these standards are Finland, Sweden, Hungary, Denmark, and the Bahamas.
Norway comes into the top five when you consider only gold medals. This model makes it extremely difficult for largely populated countries to climb the ranks. A fairer system seems warranted, something that takes into consideration both gold medals and minor medals won.
The Topend weighted medal ranking system is considered an improvement over the commonly used methods described above. It is a compromise system which incorporates both gold and total medal counts - it gives the most credit for gold medals, but then still some credit for the minor medals - so if an athlete has a large number of the minor medals without the corresponding golds then they may still rank well.
Topend Weighted Medal Tally System — gold 6 points, silver 2 points, and bronze 1 point. As this method gives a high number of points for gold medals, it generally closely matches the ranking based on the gold medal only system, and only influences the order when there is a disproportionately large number of minor medals.
You can see the ranking system in action and compare this system to the other known weighted ranking systems. See the comparisons of the ranking systems for the top ranked countries and top ranked athletes.
This created quite a bit of discussion about which ranking system should be used. The Americans were obviously quite happy with their usual system of counting total medals, but the rest of the world generally did not agree.
Maybe there is an even better system. Here is a description of a few of the different systems for ranking countries based on the medals won. You can see a comparison of how these systems affect the table order using the medal table as an example.
We have also used the same ranking systems to compare the performances of the top medal winning athletes from the Olympic Games.
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