Team USA has dominated the 2024 Paris Olympics — at least by some metrics.
American media organizations — including NBC, The New York Times and The Associated Press — rank nations based on their number of medals overall. By that measurement, the U.S. led the field as of 4 p.m. ET Friday, with 43 medals total, according to standings on the NBC Olympics website.
But some countries and organizations outside America sort nations based on their number of gold medals. By that standard, China topped the chart as of 4 p.m. ET Friday, with 13 gold medals. The U.S. was in fourth place, with nine gold medals. Google is following suit in search results.
Of course, Team USA might come out on top by both metrics. In the pandemic-delayed Tokyo Olympics, for example, Team USA won the most gold medals (39) and the most medals overall (113), according to the official Olympic leaderboard. (China nabbed 38 gold medals and 89 total medals in those Summer Games.)
It was a similar story at other recent Summer Games, including the 2016 Rio de Janeiro Olympics (Team USA earned a chart-topping 46 gold medals and 121 total medals) and the 2012 London Olympics (48 golds, 104 total), according to official Olympic statistics.
Formally, the International Olympic Committee does not explicitly say which way of keeping track is preferable. U.S. news organizations, including NBC, typically provide breakdowns of medal wins by color. The Associated Press published an interactive map that allows readers to track the medal count both by total number and individual class.
The way the U.S. presents the medal table has nonetheless attracted some scrutiny and good-natured ribbing online. In posts on TikTok and X, users highlighted the different tabulation formats.
“Every country in the world ranks by gold medals. It’s never by total,” Australia-based journalist Bradley Jurd wrote on X. “But this is a country that insists on Fahrenheit and pounds, when almost no one else does.”
Yet another Australian journalist blasted the emphasis on total medals as “American exceptionalism at its most needy and mad.” In response, an X user pushed back, calling the criticism “one of the rare times someone’s anger at America is actually very silly and unwarranted.”
The person added: “Total medal count kind of....seems like the logical way to rank it. It’s ok to not be angry for a moment.”
It isn’t completely lost on some stateside viewers that Team USA lags behind other countries in the gold-only rankings.
TikTok user @t1aojay posted a video in which he paces around a room and makes a fist at his computer screen. The text overlay reads: “Me seeing the USA have the most medals but 6th in Gold medals.” The audio track is a snippet of Kurt Russell yelling at the U.S. men’s ice hockey team in the Disney movie “Miracle.”
Russell’s character, the U.S. Olympic hockey coach Herb Brooks: “Unbelievable! You guys are playing like this is some damn throwaway game up in Rochester!”
The U.S. still has plenty of opportunities to add to its pile of gold medals, however. Team USA sent 594 athletes to Paris this year — the most of any nation — and they will be competing in 253 medal events.
The renewed attention on the differing methods has led to some fresh ideas. Two engineers in California published a webpage this week spotlighting a proposal for a new ranking system that rejects the two most common approaches.
“There’s a lot of chatter online about there being a world of difference between counting total medals and just gold medals,” said Joshua Wolk, a design engineer studying at the University of Southern California who built the proposed ranking system with his friend Jonathan Liu. “We both felt neither of those approaches were fair.”
“It’s absurd to compare a gold medal to a bronze medal equally. But on the other hand, suggesting the bronze and silver medals are worth nothing doesn’t make sense either,” Wolk added in a phone interview.
Wolk and Liu created a live weighted ranking in which each medal is assigned a different value: gold is worth one point, silver half a point, bronze a quarter of a point. By their standard, the U.S. had racked up 22 points as of 4 p.m. ET Friday.
It was enough to put Team USA in the lead.
