Which country is winning? That depends on how you count the medals

By Vahe Gregorian | St. Louis Post-Dispatch • Published August 24, 2008

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BEIJING — At the halfway point of the Beijing Olympics, discerning the winner was a simple matter. It was, of course, Slovenia, which overtook Armenia courtesy of Primoz Kozmuz’s gold medal in the hammer throw.

Should you scoff at the relevance of that Los Angeles Times-generated report based on medals per capita, there’s always the European Union approach of classifying Olympic competition by economic blocks. By coincidence, The Guardian reports, this methodology crowns the EU champion of the Beijing Olympics.

And then there’s the “Alternative Olympic Games Medal Tally” touted by Australian economist Bill Mitchell. He told The Associated Press that the clear winner is, naturally, North Korea ... at least based on his funky formula incorporating a nation’s relative wealth.

If you torture the numbers long enough, the saying goes, you can get them to confess to anything.

So is the winner of the Olympics the nation that claims the most gold medals (China, with 49), or the one with the most overall (the United States, 108 with two more guaranteed in men’s basketball and men’s water polo)?

Could it be both? Or even neither?

“There is no official way — there has never been an official medal count,” said David Wallechinsky, author of “The Complete Book of the Summer Olympics” and one of the foremost historians of the Games. “So all of this is artificial.”

The fascination with medal counts, not to mention distinguishing between golds and overall totals, really didn’t begin until after World War II.

“During the Cold War, it was a big deal,” he said. “It was like a surrogate war going on.”

Even so, it wasn’t until either the 1988 Seoul Games or perhaps Barcelona in 1992, Wallechinsky said, that the International Olympic Committee grudgingly posted medal counts for the press.

“The IOC really resisted it,” he said. “Until then it was something we all did on paper on the side.”

Today, it’s hard to find a medal table on the modern equivalent, the IOC website. But reflecting the times in several ways, the tab for medal counts is front and center on nbcolympics.com, a popular website.