Last Olympics it was popular for small countries to claim that they “really” had more medals because they had a smaller population so they had more medals per capita. Now there is a website tracking all the EU countries medals as if it was one country to prove that they actually have more.
There seems to be two problems with this system.
They’re counting the UK as part of the EU which seems to be annoying some folks particularly since they’ve decided to separate. cite
More importantly since each EU country is able to field their own team that means that they’re putting far more athletes into each sport than any other individual country. Imagine if each US state were able to field a full Olympic team.
Was already mentioned in another thread - indeed participation as a Single Olympic Team would mean fewer eligibles per event to begin with. If an event allows only 3 members per team, you may have a problem when the field under current rules included six competitors from what would have been parts of that transnational team. The assumption being made at the site is that “of course” if Athlete X is one of the three best in the world, then “of course” s/he would have made the cut for the Single Olympic Team anyway. This is not necessarily so due to the various different ways in which eligibility is selected (classifying tournaments, world rank seedings, regional championships, byes for past medalling, etc., it’s not uniform for every sport)
The (you-know-what)-measuring schtick of who got more total medals or more total golds, or greater per-capita, is in any case such a silly exercise. The six teams with double-digit golds as of this morning are unsurprisingly countries with large populations, strong economies, and strong organized-sport structures (whether official or private-sector). Well, duh. The teams are not a random sample of populations.
Meanwhile down the column, one man from Jamaica alone has more gold medals and more media bandwidth on him than all medals and publicity the whole delegation from India has; while Angelique Kerber has beat Monica Puig everytime they have played Women’s Singles Tennis except the Olympic Final in 2016. Neither size and wealth of country nor record of performance is a guarantee of results, but they do help.
Also, didn’t they tell us tons of times that Gabby Douglas was apparently the world’s third-best all-around gymnast – and so, with Simone Biles getting America the gold and Aly Raisman getting America the silver, she had a terrific shot at getting America the bronze – but Douglas wasn’t allowed to even try, because that’s an event where we can only put up two athletes instead of three?
At that, Team Germany got the gold medal in soccer, and Team Sweden got the silver, right? If there were a Team EU, that – doesn’t happen.
Brazil won the gold medal in soccer.