I really don’t pay that much attention to what is happening at the Olympics, but I do end up consuming a lot of information and statistics from it’s complete media saturation. One statistic that I do not think is very clear and doesn’t make sense is the medal counts that are shown that seems to imply 30 bronze medals are equal to 30 gold medals. I guess it’s nice to know that the Chinese have so many and the US has so many and so on. The part I find the most skewed about this measure is that most countries that compete in the Olympics do not even have athletes qualify for many events making the winners of any medal count race with the same winners nearly every time.

Does it even matter if we have one of the top 3 best athletes for such and such event? And should things like Ping pong and Fencing be weighted the same real competition?