Is the Olympics medals table fair as only the gold medals count?

Question

Or should there be some kind of point system to count the silver and bronze as well?

Answer 1

It has always been historically a "champions" (i.e. Gold medal)  count.

Having said that, there are a number of different ways that medals do get counted (purely for personal interest) to try and create a more "fair" picture.

Some of these include, medals per head of population, medals by GDP, points per medal (Gold = 4, Silver = 2, Bronze = 1)  etc.

For a great site that offers these go to:

http://simon.forsyth.net/olympics.html#G...

Such "alternative" charts do make very interesting reading and create some surprising rankings BUT the historically accepted IOC ranking remains "rank by number of Gold medals ".

Answer 2

only americans want to do that!!

cause they have no guts to accept that china is the first....

look,

they invaded iraq regardless of the UN and now they also wanna change the medal count rule without the IOC...

Answer 3

Why do all the countries taking part want to get gold medals so much if they are no different from the other two medals? This idea of new point system will definitely be welcomed by those who can't accept the fact that they are  beaten...simply because they are not good enough.

Answer 4

The medal table doesn't exist.  It's for record only.  For the record, Americans don't have any problem with China being the best team.  Team USA is doing great.  

Answer 5

I guess for country like the Us and China it really does not matter

But for countries that has not win or may not win, yes there medal are just important to them

If you were not suppose to medal, and you did, they do not care if it's a broze or silver

Also, when a country takes two or three of the medals of one events, that is impressive, all the medals counts

Ask Hungary, with five and no gold

Sweden and Greese with three medals and no gold,

If they have more Olympic medals then Thailand, with one medal, gold.  They would say yes

Answer 6

It has always been overall count that counts China is trying to make it gold but I think they don`t have a lot left that they can win

Answer 7

I think it's about Olympic champions so it's right that Gold medals have the most prestige.