Hey everyone, today I wanna talk about something I’ve been messing around with – making a medal table, like the kind you see for the Olympics. It’s been a fun little project, and I thought I’d share how I went about it.
So, first off, I had to figure out how these medal tables are usually sorted. I did some digging and found out that the main thing is the number of gold medals. That’s the first thing everyone looks at. If countries are tied in gold, then you look at the silver medals, and if they’re still tied, you go to the bronze medals. Pretty straightforward, right?
But then I started thinking, what if I wanted to do it differently? I came across some alternative ways to rank countries. One was this “LOF” system, where they give 5 points for gold, 3 for silver, and 2 for bronze. Another one, called “Topend Sports,” gives 6 points for gold, 2 for silver, and 1 for bronze. It’s kind of interesting to see how these different point systems could change the rankings.
- Sort by the number of gold medals.
- Consider silver medals for ties in gold.
- Consider bronze medals for ties in gold and silver.
- Explore alternative ranking systems like LOF (5:3:2) and Topend Sports (6:2:1).
I even thought about doing a ranking based on population, where you divide the number of medals by the country’s population. That could be a cool way to see which countries are really punching above their weight, you know?
Then it occurred to me, that these medal tables are like a history lesson. If you look at the Olympic medal tables, you can see periods where you have countries just dominating, or times when certain countries are not doing as well. They mirror wars, economic booms, and all sorts of stuff. It’s like a snapshot of what’s happening in the world at that time.
For example, it’s obvious which years the World Wars happened because the Olympics were canceled in 1916. The tables are like a visual representation of the history of the past century.
So, I started playing around with some data. I didn’t go full-on programming or anything, just used a simple spreadsheet to enter the medal counts for a few countries. I sorted them using the standard gold-silver-bronze method and then tried out the LOF and Topend Sports systems. It was really cool to see how the rankings shifted.
Experimenting with Rankings
I tried sorting the data using different methods:
- Standard Method: Gold first, then silver, then bronze.
- LOF: 5 points for gold, 3 for silver, 2 for bronze.
- Topend Sports: 6 points for gold, 2 for silver, 1 for bronze.
It was a fun little experiment. I’m not saying I’m gonna revolutionize how we rank Olympic medals or anything, but it was a neat way to learn about the different approaches and see how they can tell different stories about the data. It made me appreciate those medal tables we see on TV a bit more. There’s actually a lot of thought that goes into them!
