Medal table
At international sporting events, a medal table is the listing of sporting successes by nationality. The medal table is seen as a criterion for the success of a country and the effectiveness of the sports associations there , particularly at the Olympic Games , World and Continental Championships .
Different rating systems
In the narrower sense, only podium places (1; 2; 3) are taken into account in medal tables and the medals won are put into a classification system. Most widespread is the sorting according to the number of gold, silver and bronze medals ( mathematically this is the lexicographical order with the respective numbers as the first, second and third classification criterion).
Especially in North America, the nations are often listed according to the number of medals won. In the event of a tie, the number of gold medals decides. If this is also the same, the number of silver medals decides.
In some cases, a point system is used as a classification criterion, gold medals are usually weighted with three, five or ten points, silver medals with two, three or five points and bronze medals with one point.
In a broader sense, a medal table is also a listing of placements among the best five, six, eight or ten competitors. For example, a point system was common in the mass media of the GDR , which awarded 7 points for the victory, 5 points for the silver rank and one point less for the other places (up to one point for the sixth place).
| gold | silver | bronze | Medals | Points | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Team A | 4th | 0 | 2 | 6th | 14th |
| Team B | 3 | 2 | 2 | 7th | 15th |
| Team C | 0 | 5 | 3 | 8th | 13 |
Three teams competed in 7 competitions. Depending on the classification criterion, each of the three teams leads the medal table:
- Team A won the most gold medals
- Team B won the points evaluation • Gold = 3 points • Silver = 2 points • Bronze = 1 point
- Team C won the most medals
criticism
According to Danyel Reiche , professor of comparative political science , medal tables, although they are well established in the media, are to be classified as questionable for several reasons. Depending on the underlying sorting according to the number of all medals or just the gold medals, there are different orders. A better comparability would result in a weighting of the medals in relation to population size and gross national income. But even with such a representation team sports would be a disadvantage compared to individual sports, as for example in football is only win per team with a squad of 18 players a single medal, whereas a single float up to 16 medals over different distances in the different swimming styles at a Could win the Olympics. Medal tables do not take into account the popularity of a sport in the respective country, so that for the German population, for example, winning a gold medal in football or handball is subjectively more important than the medals regularly won in canoeing. According to the medal table, states or their athletes that cannot win a medal are all equally considered to have failed, without differentiating which round they have reached in an Olympic discipline. Finally, medal tables only highlight the placement achieved, but not the way to achieve the goal and thus leave aspects such as fair play or even doping outside of consideration, which is an assessment shared by Thomas Kurschilgen, sports director of the German Athletics Association .
Danyel Reiche suggested optimizing the system of medal tables by not only taking the top three but also other placements into account and weighting team sports more heavily than individual sports. The worldwide popularity of sports should be included in the medal table as well as penalty points and athletes convicted of doping should lead to deductions for the nation concerned.
Willi Lemke , former manager of the Bundesliga soccer club SV Werder Bremen , as the United Nations Sports Ambassador, called for the medal table to be abolished at the 2016 Summer Olympics . The fact that the medal table is used in Germany for sports funding in order to give priority to successful disciplines when awarding funding from the German Olympic Sports Confederation (DOSB) and the state is wrong in his view and should be improved. In addition, according to Lemke, the medal table is being misused by political regimes to demonstrate power.
Thomas Kurschilgen, sports director of the German Athletics Association , announced during the European Athletics Championships 2016 in Amsterdam: "We shouldn't wear the medal table in front of us like a monstrance" . Differentiated information on the performance of a sports association or the individual performance of an athlete is not possible with the medal table, because "the reality of top-class sport is far too complex to be shown in a striking medal table" . In the target agreements for the 2016 Olympic Games, a medal corridor of 38 to 68 medals was determined between DOSB and the 28 participating sports associations. Three years before the competition, each association had to announce the number of medals expected at the Olympics. "If winning a medal is assessed as a success and a not achieved final as a defeat, then the individual athlete only becomes a means to an end in the consideration of the sports officials" , Kurschilgen summarizes his concerns.
The undifferentiated counting of the medal wins of the different nations led in the 2010s to the fact that financially stronger Western European, Arab or American sports associations, especially athletes from African and Caribbean countries who were particularly successful in athletics, were persuaded to switch to their own association and the necessary naturalization. In the summer of 2016, the Confédération Africaine d'Athlétisme , the continental federation of African national athletics associations, complained about the massive change of nationality of athletes, especially sprinters, medium and long-distance runners, who, according to the current IAAF regulations, are eligible to compete for the new nation after just three years are. As a result, nine of Turkey's twelve medals at the 2016 European Athletics Championships were won by naturalized athletes, which means that Turkey was able to show more medals in the medal table than at all previous European Championships combined.
See also
- Eternal medal table of the Olympic Games
- Eternal medal table of the Summer Olympics
- Eternal medal table of the Olympic Winter Games
- Winner of the Nations Cup at the Olympic Games
- Eternal medal table of the figure skating world championships
Individual evidence
- ↑ a b c d e f g h i Spiegel Online : Criticism of rankings: Why medal tables are questionable , Danyel Reiche , August 5, 2016
- ↑ Zeit Online : Sotschi 2014: The other medal table ( Memento of the original from August 14, 2016 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. , Sascha Venohr, February 23, 2014
- ↑ a b c d e f Dresdner latest news : DLV sports director Kurschilgen: medal table no monstrance , athletics, Amsterdam, dpa , 7 July 2016
- ↑ a b c RP Online : Interview with Willi Lemke: “Medal table should be abolished” , Gianni Costa, August 10, 2016
- ↑ a b c Westfälische Nachrichten : Africa laments sell-out - Athletics: Association fights against arbitrary change , Sport, September 7, 2016
