Is there an official way to determing a countries rank in the medal standings?
All countries websites (CBC, BBC, Australia) is ranking based on number of gold medals won which puts China in first place.
Except NBC which is ranking based on the over all medal count which puts the USA in first.
Is there an ‘official’ way do determine it or is it just dependant on the whims of the network producer?
There is no “official” ranking. The ordering is at the whim of the person or organization creating the chart.
I like looking at the per capita medal table - New Zealand was second behind Slovenia until Jamaica unleashed Usain Bolt.
There is no official way to rank countries, really.
Si
The IOC has the following to say on the medal table pages:
Just for the heck of it , I applied track and field scoring to the medal counts.
5 points 1st/Gold
3 points 2nd/Silver
1 points 3rd/Bronze
The medal counts and rankings I copied off the NBC website about 7:45am PDT.
G S B total pts
US 31 36 35 102 298
China 47 17 25 89 311
Russia 17 18 22 57 161
Great Britain 18 13 13 44 142
Australia 12 14 16 42 118
Germany 14 9 13 36 110
France 5 13 16 34 80
South Korea 11 10 7 28 92
Japan 9 6 10 25 73
Italy 7 8 10 25 69
I have also seen a system giving 6 points for a gold medal, 5 points for a silver, and so on down to 1 point for a sixth place finish. Nice for the countries that have some good athletes but not quite good enough for the medals, but just as meaningless as any of the others when it comes right down to it.
I haven’t seen it for quite a while, I suspect because it’s a bit of a pain to compile.
I went with t&f scoring as a 1st place still gives more weight than a combined 2nd and 3rd which seems appropriate to me. Of course, I do coach track so I might be just a wee bit biased. 
Humm - very interesting responses (not what I was expecting).
However, I suppose that any sort of ranking is kind of meaningless anyway - I mean if Canada has more medals than Namibia it doesn’t mean much of anything when you start to compair GDP and political stability and whatnot.
I have to admit that I find the ‘gold takes precedence’ approach sort of odd - I mean if country ‘a’ wins 100 bronze medals and 100 silver medals it seems funny to rank them below country ‘b’ that wins one gold medal, although that’s how they’ve done it on the CBC website. (That’s an exageration, of course).
It seems to me that any ‘ranking’ of countries is pretty much contrary to the entire Olympic spirit.
These are supposed to be games for the whole world to participate in a free & friendly manner. In ancient Greece when the Olympics started, all wars were halted during the Olympic Games.
Seems like counting up the medals won by each country, and hyping a ‘competition’ and a ‘winner’ is going the opposite direction.
You just seen a problem with statistics, they are so easily manipulated.
I used to like how Billboard would ranks songs.
For instance at the year end they would assign points reverse. So if a song was #1 in the Top 100. It woud get 100 points, it would also get “bonus” points equal to 1+2+3+4…+99.
The bonus was a weighting factor because you can’t go higher than #1
For instance if “We Are The World” is #1 because it sold a million records and was played a million times on the radio and Madonna’s “Crazy For You,” was number 2 and sold 999,999 and was played 999,999 times the songs are really about equal. But say “Crazy For You” only sold 100,000 and was played 100,000 times. It’s still #2 but the song isn’t anywhere close to the #1 song.
This is a problem when you compare songs. Songs like by the Beatles were generally massive sellers. So a Beatle song was release and it quickly rose to #1 because everyone ran out and bought it, then the next week it fell out of #1 because everyone bought the song in one week.
So if you look at it the same way with medals you see the problem.
Let’s say Michael Phelps wins a lot of medals and he doesn’t have to work and can train 16 hours a day. (I don’t know if he does but we’ll say he does). Let’s say the person with a bronze medal trains 2 hours a day and works a full time job. Who’s medal is more impressive?
That become subjective.
Yahoo uses overall medal count too. This question occurred to me too. Even though these lists aren’t 'official’they’re always compiled by the media at each Olympics. As I recall the most popular method has always been by number of gold medals.
I also saw one website that was ranking the medal count proportinately to the number of athletes sent by each country. In my mind, the most significant statistics (if you really want to rank) are:
Total medal count
Medal count / population
Medal count / number of athletes
Though these ones from si_blakely’s link are interesting too:
Medal count / GDP
Medal count / GDP per person
I don’t think that ranking solely by gold medal count is that useful - many times the differences in achievement between gold and silver and bronze are minuscule.
This sounds like a good system too.
Newspapers usually ranked by medal total, with ties broken by number of golds, then silvers, then bronze.
Thus, if you won one gold, you were listed higher than a country that won one silver. If all were the same, they were listed alphabetically.
I think I’d like to see team sports weighted differently.
Michael Phelps wins 8 races and gets 8 golds.
Basketball wins 8 games and gets 1 gold.