For the summer Olympics, the US has been the most dominant country over the last century, winning 15 games out of 26 games since 1904. During the Soviet era, there were years that they dominated as well, winning 8 out of 11 Olympic games, but since the fall of the Soviet union, it has been USA all the way. Great Britian won the 1908 Olympics in London. Germany won the 1936 games in Berlin. China was competitive when the Olympics were held in Beijing in 2008. And Russia was competitive in 2000 and 2004.
Other than China, without a coalition country like the Soviets, can any other country foreseeably beat the USA?
Medal count is a pretty silly metric, when there is so much difference between sports in how many medals are given.
For example, swimming seems to have an incredible number of medal events: 50 meter, 100, 200, 400, & 1500 meter, and repeated in backstroke, butterfly, freestyle, & medley, then team relay events. And then repeated for mens & womens events.
Whereas other events like Pentathlon involve competing in 5 greatly differing activities, but all for a single medal. Or the equestrian events, where they do courses of roads, steeplechase, tracks, and cross-country, all for a single medal.
a country could dominate, winning every single equestrian event, and still get less medals than a single swimmer like Spitz or Phelps.
In terms of the numbers of medals won it is highly unremarkable that nations with hundreds of millions of people, enough cash, enough sporting and coaching facilities and enough political or cultural impetus to make it happen will necessarily top the table over a wide range of sports.
So…USA, China, Russia (unfortunately) should be…and are…up there at the top.
The current medal table (as of the start of August 10) has the US with nine more medals than China but only one more gold. This is mostly due to the US cleaning up in swimming (eighteen medals total, seven gold) with the other golds coming in women’s team gymnastics and 10 m air rifle. China has three golds in diving, three in weightlifting, and one each in shooting and swimming. China has multiple medals in all sports they’ve won medals except fencing, while the only sports that the US has won multiple medals in is shooting with two and the eighteen in swimming.
It also always depends on how you define the table. Japan’s got the third-most medals overall with fourteen, but ten of them are bronze and the three gold puts them in eighth when the ranking is total gold, then silver, then bronze.
That was kind of my point. How could one possibly judge which country “won the Olympic games”. There is just no objective way to measure that.
I suppose one could use a weighted medal count metric where gold = 3 points, silver = 2 and bronze = 1. Tally that up and divide by the number of Olympic games it took to accumulate them, but even that would be clouded by nation restructuring over the years (for example, do East and West German medals count towards a single Germany total? How about the unified team of Germany, where do those get counted?). Using the points per games metric the Unified Team scored 240 points in their only Olympic games. The USSR averaged 236 points in each of the 10 Olympic games they participated in, while the US came in third at 196 points per games in 26 appearances. My medal count numbers came from here.
That’s a pretty reasonable argument. Personally, I also think it’s even sillier when people dismiss medals other than gold. Like, they’re not just awarding gold, and nothing else, why are we acting like the other medals don’t matter?
I think that Title IX is also a big reason for the advantage the US has in the medal count.