The calculus for medals is nowhere near 3-2-1 nor 5-3-1.
Ask an athlete how many silver medals they’d swap for a gold, that’ll give you a better idea and I suspect at best you are talking in double figures with a more common answer being “as many as I’ve got”
So the only thing that matters if you want to rank performances is the number of golds with silver and bronze used to break a tie if needed.
Are you sure? I mean, I’m not a high level athlete nor do I know any, but who comes home from the olympics happier… a swimmer who swam 8 races and got 8 silvers, or a swimmer who swam 8 races and got 1 gold and no other medals?
Certainly, if you look at non-olympic sports, a tennis player who loses in the finals of all four majors has had a much better year than a tennis player who wins one major and scrubs out of the other three. Granted, in that case, you actually win a huge amount of money, so you can just compare your wallets.
Still… my guess (with nothing to back it up) is that it’s not as clearcut as you’re making it out to be.
But why are you asking just them? The parties pouring money into this are the national olympic committees, and silvers and bronzes mean plenty to them. They means TV ratings, happy sponsors, and more money.
But the USA doesn’t send all those athletes just because they feel like it. They send them because the performance of American athletes in various international competitions means they qualify to do so.
Exactly so. All the more reason the “Medal Count” is dumb. The US sent 600+ athletes to these Olympics (out of 11K+), more than any other country. We are fortunate to have such a deep pool of talent, with athletes and organizations having resources to send people to competition in nearly every event. Counting medals makes people feel good, I get that, but with such a huge team it should not be much of a surprise that we are at or near the top in number of medals, no matter how you slice it.
U.S.A.! U.S.A.! U.S.A.!..
I suspect the latter by some distance for the vast majority of athletes.
Well I strongly disagree with that. Go to the top 100 tennis players in the world and give them the choice of 4 major finals in a year or one major win and 3 last 16 losses. If the responses were not 99-1 in favour of the latter I’d be astonished.
Because in my opinion the true worth of a medal is judged by the athletes who compete for them. The calculus in this thread has, at best, suggested that two silvers are worth a gold and I’m claiming that the actual athletes involved value a gold far, far higher then that.
I looked up a few tennis prize distributions and the runners-up seem to make in the range of 35-55% of first place (Wimbledon is 53%). From this I conclude that the typical player would not give up 4 second-places for a single first-place.
I think you wrong in assuming that tennis players measure success purely in terms of prize money.
Using Wimbledon as a source, a back-of-the-fag-packet would my see my scenario playing out thus.
4 losing finals - £3.6 million
1 win and 3 last 16 - £2.24 million
I don’t think that prize money differential is anywhere near enough to tempt the players in chosing the 4 losing finals. Especially not when the marketing rewards for a win dwarf those for losing finalists.
How about two Grand Slam wins and two quarterfinal washouts versus one Grand Slam win and runner-up in the other three championship finals?
I’m not sure why you’re including the “3 last 16” since the original question is whether 2 silvers is worth 1 gold. A Wimbledon win is worth $2.4M and runner-up is $1.27M.
I suppose the marketing rewards might make a difference but that’s hard to calculate. In any case, athletes are doing a job. The prize money is largely how they make a living. Maybe some are in it solely for the thrill of the sport or whatever, but they still have to pay off their mortgages.
The two grand slams every single time and I bet there is no top player who’d even have to think about it.
The reference to tennis comes from here.
To which I responded
Well, sure, and that’s the issue with who’s “Winning” - it’s opinion.
But, with due respect, you are wrong even in this claim, because you seem to be asserting silver and bronze medals have almost no value to the athletes, which is clearly not the case.
After thinking about it a bit more, it’s probably unanswerable, because it depends so much on context, expectation, etc. For instance, everyone knows the US women are absurdly dominant in basketball. So I bet whoever wins the silver will go home feeling pretty happy. But… suppose they’re actually way ahead of the US women at half time, and then then end up hanging onto the lead until the very very end and then losing to a buzzer beater? Then they’d probably go home feeling sad.
Or again, an olympic swimmer winning 8 silvers? Well, if they lose all 8 races to michael phelps, who sets a WR in each and is several lengths ahead… then beating the rest of the field probably feels like a win. But Michael Phelps getting 8 silvers would probably feel like a massive disappointment.
Winning one gold in eight races and scrubbing out of the other seven, how does that feel? Well, maybe if you were ranked 30th in the world in all of them and in one you just absolutely gave the performance of your life and came out of nowhere and won a gold, you would feel AMAZING. But if you were ranked 2nd in the world in all, and slightly overperformed in one to win (yay!), but totally tanked the rest (boo!) you’d probably feel, on the whole, pretty bad.
So, overall, I don’t think there’s hard and fast rule… except that saying “athletes don’t really care about anything other than gold” is almost certainly wrong.
Altho this is getting further off-topic, here is one view on how happy Olympic athletes may be with their medals:
“It’s pretty counterintuitive because the silver medalist just performed better, but we found that third place winners tend to express more happiness after an Olympic event, than those who come in second,” Andrea Luangrath, a University of Iowa assistant marketing professor, told NPR.
“Of course,” she added, “gold medalists are the happiest of all.”
… snip …
“Silver medalists tend to think about, and compare themselves to, that gold medalist,” Laungrath explained. "So they think, ‘Maybe if I had only done something different, I could have won that gold medal.’ " That sort of thinking can be especially pervasive when the top two positions can be separated by nearly imperceptible milliseconds.
“But that bronze medalist, they’re actually forming a downward comparison. And they’re thinking, at least I’m not that fourth place finisher. At least I’m not that person who didn’t even earn a medal.”
I don’t know how you get that from what I’ve said. This is a relative not an absolute judgement.
I’m clearly saying that the value of silver and bronze is greatly diminished when compared to a gold.
Winning a small amount of money has worth. Winning a lottery jackpot is in another stratosphere and saying so doesn’t dimish the worth of the smaller amount.
I must say I’m surprised at getting any push back on this idea at all.It’s as if no-one has ever heard top athletes speak about motivation and goals.
I repeat, show me an athlete with 10 silvers and I’ll show you an athlete willing to swap them all for a single gold.
(I’ve asked at least a dozen colleagues this exact question, all sports fans, and every single one has agreed with me without hesitation)
I agree and that is absolutely not what I’m saying.
A friend of mine won two medals (bronze and silver) in two successive Olympics. She wasn’t a favorite to win but also wasn’t a dark horse, so the medals didn’t come completely out of the blue. But she was thrilled being able to represent the US, win medals, and be in the spotlight in an otherwise mostly niche sport. Certainly, winning gold would have been even more exciting, but I don’t think it would have changed her experience too dramatically.
AIUI, medal satisfaction or disappointment stems mostly from how well the athlete was expected to do. If Phelps got a bronze, that would be a disappointment for him, but if some totally unheard-of 50th-ranked swimmer got bronze, he’d be delighted.
Though there is also a saying that “2nd place is the unhappiest medalist.” Gold is happy of course, bronze is (usually) glad just to be on the podium, but the silver medalist is the person who thought they ought to be gold.
Would she have given up her silver and bronze for a gold?