If winning Gold in the olympics doesnt matter?

Question

why do we badly want gold for the men's and women's team in basketball, phelps in swimming, etc.? seriously, how many bronze or silver medal athletes have we glorified? we even felt sorry for the us basketball team when they only got the bronze in athens. and now, when china is ahead in gold medals, we fool ourselves that we're ahead of the chinese by this overall medal count thing... do we really mean it when we say winning Gold doesnt matter or we're just saying it coz we have more silver and bronze and it will make US topping the olympics look legit?

Answer 1

Huh? Who says winning gold doesn't matter? The unweighted Yahoo version of the medal count is flawed (they should count gold medals as five points, silver as three and bronze as one, as is traditionally done). But their little chart has nothing to do with American Olympians and what they value. I haven't yet heard from a single one who thinks a bronze is just as good as a gold.

Still, we "glorify" our bronze and silver winners because their accomplishments are still great. Think about it: there are six and a half billion people in the world and there have been tens of thousands of Olympians. If you just happen to be the second- or third-best person in the world at something at any given moment, that's still jaw-droppingly amazing.

Answer 2

Well I am not an American so I don't know if winning Gold matters to you guys.  But what I DO know is that the medal tally is always ranked by the number Gold medals then the number of Silver and lastly the number of bronze.  So if the USA wants to 'TOP' the table as you say they need to win the most GOLD medals.

Answer 3

Sorry for the US men's basketball team in Athens because they got the bronze? Sorry, not me. I was disappointed they got any medal. To me they seemed more like "Yeah, we're US, we're pros. Just give us the gold and let's not even bother with the formality of playing." Would have been way better for us had our men's team finished outside the medals altogether.

And fool ourselves that we're ahead in the medal count? Again, sorry but no. The first Olympic's I can remember seeing was the '84 LA games and every games since then I've always seen it as the total medal count, with the total gold medal count only coming into play when there's a tie for total medals. '84 was before there was a Yahoo or Google, back when you had to check you're local paper daily for the medal count. And every source I've seen since then has done the same. I can still remember looking in the papers during the first week of the '96 games and saying so and so is leading in the medal count but X nation has more golds so far.