Anyone able to generate Olympic medal Table (awarded not events won)

August 14, 2016 1:54 AM

All the available Olympic medals tables are events won not medals awarded. By this I mean if a country wins a Rowing 8 that is 9 medals (8+cox) not 1 as in the available table, if you win cycle team pursuit that is 4 medals not 1 as in the available table, football? rugby 7s? hockey? I think you get my drift. I know I could do it myself with a pen and paper but maybe somebody out there has found it, done it or has a cleverer way to generate it.
posted by priorpark17 to Sports, Hobbies, & Recreation (6 answers total)

That was a fun little Sunday task :-) Result:

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1Hdq1iTuQu32LMsTwIoJOMPXe2fdLYCP5M9_lcqCmRxw/edit?usp=sharing

Explanation:
- This page has the information you want -- the medal count by athlete, not by country
- In the page source, you will see that all of data is present in JSON format; this is "var pageAllMedalistsJson" followed by the data
- I wrote a small Python script to process that data and count the athletes' medals by country. Hence, the result above.

Don't hesitate if you have any questions / MeMail if you want me to run the script again in the future with an updated number of medals. Cheers!
posted by vert canard at 10:14 AM on August 14, 2016 [3 favorites]

Response by poster: Very very much appreciated. Maybe you could run it at the end of the games. It has always bugged that they say for example USA has won 24 golds when they have clearly won more.
posted by priorpark17 at 10:54 AM on August 14, 2016

It depends on how you're looking at it: number of medals won or number of athletes with medals. These are not the same thing. In a team competition the team is awarded the medal, not the individual athletes on the team. The individual athletes each get a physical medal because they are part of the team, but it's still a single team award. In sports such as swimming, where an athlete may compete in several individual and team events, this creates a confusion because, for example, a swimmer might win an individual medal and also be part of a relay team that wins a medal. People will say that he won two medals, but in reality he didn't. He won a medal, and his relay team won a medal. Most realistic would be to say that he won 1.25 medals, comprised of his individual medal and his 1/4 share of the relay team medal. But because we tend to count medals awarded to a team as accumulating wholly to an individual's medal count, there will always be this discrepancy. But, in my view, the lower count is the correct count. It doesn't make sense to say that a country that medaled in a single team event such as soccer earned more medals than a country that medaled in five individual events. The correct count is 1 to 5, not 18 to 5.
posted by slkinsey at 11:42 AM on August 14, 2016 [2 favorites]

It is even more complicated than slkinsey lets on because in at least swimming and track & field, countries can field different people in preliminary heats of relays than compete in the finals. To the best of my knowledge all of those competitors get medals.
posted by mmascolino at 1:53 PM on August 14, 2016

It has always bugged that they say for example USA has won 24 golds when they have clearly won more.

Though measuring it the way you propose would also skew things unfairly, as countries which excel at the big team sports would automatically have a massive advantage in the medal table over countries which are better at individual sports.

On preview, pretty much what slkinsey said.
posted by penguin pie at 3:02 PM on August 14, 2016

Response by poster: And if it is a tie then gold medals are awarded, but they seem to count as a full medal in the broadcasters medals table....

If you can be bothered to do a table for sitting down sports (rowing, canoe, riding, sailing, etc). Just eyeballing it I think the UK tops the sitting down Olympics.
posted by priorpark17 at 10:10 AM on August 15, 2016