Could i have some information on medal tally in the past,does American alway top the medal tally?

Question

i want some detail information about this.

Answer 1

No, the United states has never topped the USSR since it began its huge run in the 1950's. The USSR had a sports machine that dominated like no country has ever done. East Germany had a great system too, considering it's a smaller country it was better at producing great athletes, probably the best of the Stalin-descended communist countries. Best non-Stalin-influenced communist country has long been Cuba, which dominated baseball and boxing for ages and ages. I'm sure they're upset with baseball being kicked  out of the olympics.

The US topped the medals in 1984, but the USSR and Warsaw pact weren't there, because of the revenge boycott due to the US boycott of the 1980 Moscow olympics.

After the USSR split up its former states competed as a unified team one time, after that Russia hasn't dominated the medals, and East Germany being merged into Germany made its sports program disintegrate, so Germany's medal performance declined drastically. The former Soviet republics, if you count all their medals combined, would still be at or near the top though. Turns out Ukraine, Kazakhstan, Belarus, Armenia, they all counted. The USSR wasn't just Russia, but 15 nations.

This is when the US began its medal-count dominance, starting in 1996 for summer and 1998 for the winter (I think the unified team was still competing in the 1994 winters)

In fact I just counted and the total for former SSR's is 92 medals, 20 more than the US has.

As for topping the medal tally in general, it's a silly notion that total number of medals means anything, when you treat a bronze or a silver the same as a gold. The US is not on top of the medal tally when it has barely half as many golds as China's astonishing 39. An honest scoring system would give 3 points for a gold, 2 for a silver and 1 for a bronze. That would make the rankings like this:

China: 159

United States 138

Australia: 65

Russia: 65

Britain: 58

Germany: 48

South Korea: 48

France: 47

and so on and so forth. That would reverse the positions of several countries. I think even using this conservative 3-2-1 formula devalues a gold medal, a lot of people would agree that giving 5 to gold, 3 to silver and 1 to bronze would be more appropriate.

Answer 2

Older people will remember that until the 1990s the USSR and East Germany used to get as many if not more medals than the US. When the Olympics first started Britain used to get the most medals but in fact you had sportsmen from the British empire competing for Britain so they had an advantage.