Who's on First in Medals Race?

A Simple Question Gets Complicated; Silver Isn't Golden

BEIJING -- Sports fans from the U.S. and China had cause to celebrate Tuesday, with both sides able to claim that the day's results left them firmly atop the Olympic medals tables.

And the interesting thing is that both sides were right. Despite all the high-tech clocks, cameras and sensors, the Olympics still can't give a definitive answer to one basic question: Who is winning the medals race?

The reason is due to a divide between the U.S. and the rest of the world. The U.S. -- actually its media, including The Wall Street Journal -- ranks countries by all the medals a team wins. At the end of Tuesday's competition in Beijing, the U.S. tops that table with 22, versus 20 for China. The rest of the world ranks countries by golds. Silver and bronze are used only as tie-breakers. By that tally, China sat atop the rankings, with 13 gold medals, compared with seven for the U.S. (Wednesday's medal events will have added to all these numbers.)

The split has its roots in the early days of the Olympics and reflects the movement's evolution, from an organization that sought to eliminate nations' victories over one another to one that celebrates them. And while it's primarily a quirky point for most people, the difference in the medal tables arguably has its serious side too. Some see in the gold-first ranking -- which is unofficially endorsed by the International Olympic Committee -- one reason why countries have become increasingly ruthless in cutting funding for sports where they don't have a clear shot at a gold.

"The message is that winning is everything," says James Riordan, emeritus professor of sports history at Surrey University in Britain. "That's not the message the Games are supposed to convey. Why have silvers and bronzes?"

Strictly speaking, medal tables aren't supposed to exist. According to the Olympic Charter, "The IOC and the OCOG (the local Organizing Committee of the Olympic Games) shall not draw up any global ranking per country." Instead, the host stadium is supposed to display a "roll of honor" of the individual winners.

That wording was inserted into the charter in 1924 after organizers in some cities began ranking countries. In 1908, for example, the organizers of the London Games awarded five points for gold, three for silver and one for bronze. They also meticulously separated out people from different countries who played on the same team -- that was allowed back then, and split the points. The result: the U.K. topped the table with 130.5 points, followed by 44.5 for the U.S.

The issue roared to the front during the Cold War, when national rankings became a measure of ideological potency. But even then, the IOC held firm and refused to endorse rankings.

Starting in 1992, however, the IOC began to accommodate medals tables, according to Australian IOC member Kevan Gosper. It began to tally medals by countries and issue final lists, although these aren't considered official rankings, he said. He said he talked to various media organizations about how to rank countries, "and they said not to mess with it." That meant a split.

"Most of the world wants it as gold, and that's how we do it," says Paul Radford, global sports editor of Britain's Reuters wire service. As for the Associated Press in New York, it "has always aggregated it by total medals for as long as we can remember," said its sports-statistics editor Paul Montella. For non-U.S. customers, however, AP provides the gold-first table.

In recent years, the IOC has begun to swing toward the gold-first rankings. Spokeswoman Sandrine Tonge said the IOC doesn't endorse one table over the other. When asked why the IOC Web site has historical tallies for previous Olympiads, with nations ranked by gold, Ms. Tonge declined to comment, saying it was simply a convenience.

Both systems have their supporters and detractors. The argument for the gold-first table is that winning is what matters. Chinese-sports historian Lu Yuanzhen said Chinese sports officials have a slogan for it: "One gold is worth a thousand silver."


Ranking countries by the number of golds instead of total medals is "a stupid idea," says Gennady Shvets, press attache for Russia's national Olympic committee. His argument, in fact, is in keeping with the U.S.-centric point of view. Mr. Shvets notes that the gold system means that a small country with a single champion who wins, say, seven gold medals would be ranked according to this system ahead of a big country like Russia that won, say, six golds, 20 silvers and 25 bronzes. "And this big country would be below this one guy," he complains. In Athens, Russia won 92 medals, including 27 gold, but in the main medals table it was ranked behind China, with 32 golds but just 63 total medals. (The U.S. was first with 102 total medals, including 36 golds.)

Raising the issue with the IOC does no good, Mr. Shvets says, because "they say it's not official. Everybody says it's not official." Yet despite that, the gold counts are sometimes prominently displayed. In Sydney in 2000, Mr. Shvets says, there was a tall tower in the Olympic area that showed the top medal-winning countries -- golds only. "They updated it every day," he says.

Beyond the frustration, a more serious issue is that the tables are taken seriously by sports officials around the world. Over the past few years, an array of countries, from Australia and Japan to France and Germany, have begun adopting policies aimed at gold. They have done so by cutting funding for sports that aren't likely to win gold. The German motto for this year's Games is "maintain 6th in Beijing and move to 5th in London" -- based on the gold-first tally. Funding is being tailored accordingly, according to German sports officials.

Moving away from the gold-first table may be impossible, says Mr. Gosper, himself the owner of a medal in the 4x400 track relay at the 1956 Melbourne Games.

"I guess at the end of the day being a champion is what counts and having that gold medal," Mr. Gosper says. "I say that, hand on my heart, as a silver medalist."

The Journal's Olympics page boasts full coverage of the 2008 Beijing Games, from politics and the environment to sports and the business of sports, with real-time updates from Journal reporters. Plus, see medal counts, athlete biographies, national profiles, statistics and more.

Write to Ian Johnson at ian.johnson@wsj.com

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