Why is NBC changing the Olympic Medal Table order?

Question

For all history the medal count order has always been in that the country with the most gold medals, after all the real winner is only the gold medalist.

Now here comes the real mystery, since the 2004 Olympics, NBC has changed this to displaying the order for the overall count instead of the gold order. Why?

Someone said that American media has always ranked total medals but this is wrong, I have newspapers from Barcelona and Atlanta and taped coverage of Atlanta, Sydney and Athens. In Barcelona and Atlanta they have gold medal order, I don't have anything on Sydney but I think they also ranked by gold but since 2004 they changed order to total medals.

Also, back in 1992 they even had the "Unified Team" which was the former Soviet Union being represented as one entity beat the U.S. and NBC presented the medal table by the gold ranking.

Answer 1

I think they're doing it because they want to show that the Americans have more medals overall than the Chinese do even though the Chinese have the most gold medals. I think it's because most people viewing this listing are Americans and are only interested in seeing how many medals that country has won.

Answer 2

It's bullcrap. I'm from the UK and was on ESPN US site and saw USA first and I was like wtf?. The I checked Fox and NBC and they all had USA first. I think it's just to show you guys are number one and bla bla bla (no offense intended). Thank you for reading.

Answer 3

To make sure the US stays first.  It's pretty stupid....

Answer 4

Channel 4 News in the UK have a table where you can compare both ways of ordering the table, as well as scaling it in various ways, by GDP, population, etc http://channel4.com/olympics

Answer 5

IT'S A NICE WAY TO PRETEND THE U.S. IS LEADING AND WINNING THE GAMES. Pathetic really. And strange.

By that logic, winning only 50 bronze medals means coming out on top of a country that wins 30 Golds. What!?!?

Or put it this way, if some Olympian had managed to win 9 medals, say, 3 golds, 2 silvers, 4 bronzes, would U.S. media accept this athlete did better than Phelps by having a higher medal count. h**l NO!

Answer 6

I believe that the US media has made an arbitrary change to show the US results in the best light.  

A medal count that counts a bronze medal to be of equal value as a gold is dumb.  A medal count that only really factors gold medals in the ranking is also dumb.

Points should be allocated on a per medal basis.  4 points for gold, 2 points for silver and one for bronze would work best.  This is on the basis that a gold is twice as good as a silver and a silver is twice as a bronze.