🥇 Plot the Medals
An alternative assessment of each country's performance at the 2024 Summer Olympic Games
Welcome to a special post-Olympics edition of Plot the Ball!
The regular Saturday newsletter — My Week in Sport(s) — will be on an extended break during August, and will return on Saturday September 14th.
🥇 Plot the Medals
The sports which provide the Summer Olympic Games with its flagship events — disciplines like athletics, swimming and gymnastics — are not ones which this newsletter tends to engage with1.
What would the medal table have looked like in Paris if the only events which took place were ball sports, though?
I was interested in the answer to this question — and thought readers of Plot the Ball might be too.
Sports
By my count, there were 13 team or individual ball sports in which athletes competed this summer: Badminton, Basketball, 3x3 Basketball, Football, Golf, Handball, Hockey, Rugby Sevens, Table Tennis, Tennis, Volleyball, Beach Volleyball and Water Polo.
Weighting
The question of how to weight bronze, silver and gold medals in the table was also a live question throughout this Games — as the United States streaked ahead in the total medal count, but was matched by China in the tally of golds.
To keep things simple here, I have applied a weighting of 3x to each nation’s gold medals in these sports, 2x to silver and 1x to bronze.
Other adjustments
However, I also wanted to ensure that I was applying equal weighting to each of the 13 disciplines in this analysis. A small number of these ball sports — Badminton, Table Tennis and Tennis — had five potential gold medals2 available in Paris, while the others offered just two.
To account for this, I’ve adjusted the count of medals won by nations in those three sports to align with the other 10. For example, China’s two golds and three silvers in Badminton — 40% of the golds and 60% of the silvers available — have been converted to 0.8 and 1.2 adjusted medals.
Results
How does the weighted, adjusted top 10 look for this set of sports, then?
The United States — who sit first in the traditional medal table, when you apply a 3x-2x-1x weighting to the total number of golds, silvers and bronzes won by each country — remain top here.
China are second in that overall weighted table, but trade places with France (third) in this subset.
The host nation only get credited with two (adjusted) golds — their wins in the men’s Rugby Sevens and the men’s Volleyball — but took home five silver medals earlier this month: in both the men’s and women’s Basketball, men’s 3x3 Basketball, men’s Football and women’s Handball.
They’re not the only European nation to come out of this analysis favourably. Germany, Spain and the Netherlands — who occupy the positions from fourth to sixth here — all move up from lower slots in the traditional table3, as do Denmark and Serbia in ninth and 10th4.
There are a couple of surprising names among the prominent fallers. Australia — who were fifth in the traditional table — won just one gold, one silver and one bronze in this subset of sports, dropping out of the top 10 and down to 14th position.
And Great Britain5 only have Tommy Fleetwood’s silver medal in the men’s Golf to their name across these 13 disciplines, meaning they fall from fourth in the traditional table to 21st when only ball sports are counted.
If you want to catch up on what I’ve published at Plot the Ball so far this year, you can read through the archive here.
If you want to read interesting data-driven (or data-adjacent) pieces about these sports, I would recommend: John Burn-Murdoch’s exploration of the impact of ‘super shoes’ on track events for the FT; Jenny Vrentas’ piece for the New York Times on how elite swimmers are analysing “information that you can’t see with the naked eye” to improve their performance; and this piece on Simone Biles’ dominant career by Emily Giambalvo and Álvaro Valiño for the Washington Post.
Men’s and women’s singles, men’s and women’s doubles and mixed doubles in Tennis and Badminton; men’s and women’s singles, men’s and women’s team and mixed doubles in Table Tennis.
Ninth, 15th and eighth respectively.
From 26th and 33rd respectively.