Who's Pulling Ahead — or Falling Behind — in the Olympic Medal Race?
South Korea is surging, while the U.S. has some catching up to do.
One of the big themes of the 2024 Paris Olympics so far has been that the United States is underperforming — especially in the pool, and especially when it comes to winning gold medals. Some of the American favorites have delivered — Katie Ledecky won gold, as expected, in the 1500m Freestyle, for instance — and the U.S. finished Monday leading the overall medal table. But how many medals should we have expected them (and every other country) to have by now?
To help answer that, I decided to re-launch my Olympic medal count tracker from the old FiveThirtyEight days. The premise is relatively simple:1 Take each participating country’s rate of winning each type of medal in each sport over the previous three Olympics, weight for recency and make adjustments for other factors such as home advantage,2 track how many medals have been awarded to date — and how many are left to be awarded — and use that data to project how many medals each country “should” have won at any given moment based on how it usually does in the sports that have handed out medals.
If we do that, we would have expected the U.S. to be leading with 29.6 golds and 75.1 total medals through Monday (not including the surfing final). Instead, the Americans are running behind by approximately 10 golds, though they do actually have more total medals than we would expect:
Big overperformances in the silver and bronze medals have helped the U.S. stay ahead of where we would expect in total medals, despite the huge shortfall in golds. Here’s where that has come from for the Americans so far, sorting the table of sports by overall medal differential versus expected:
Down at the bottom? Gymnastics and swimming — typically the stalwarts of the American Olympic program, but ones that have fallen sort in golds (and, in the case of gymnasts, silvers) so far in Paris.3
If the U.S. is arguably the most disappointing team at the 2024 Olympics if we weight golds more heavily, which teams are team doing the best relative to expectations so far? Here’s a look at a weighted medal count versus expectations (using a 4-2-1 weighting scheme):
South Korea, which added another gold today thanks to An Se-young in Women’s Badminton, comes out on top of the list, having won 2.9 more golds than expected and 4.1 more silvers. They’re joined near the top by Australia, Great Britain and Canada, with Ireland and the host country France not far behind. (Remember, we adjust for home-country effects.)
The good news for the U.S., though? They may well end up on top for golds and medals (weighted or unweighted) anyway. The Americans have plenty more events remaining that they are expected to produce medals, gold or otherwise, in:
If we add actual medals to-date plus expected future medals, the tracker thinks the U.S. will end up with 40 golds and 129 medals overall — both of which would lead all countries, even if they are lower than the tally we would have projected coming into the Paris games. But that’s also the work Team USA has in front of it as it looks ahead to the final six days of these Olympics, and a chance to redeem its slow start to some degree or another.
Filed under: Olympics
In theory, at least. In practice, you need to gather data across hundreds of events in dozens of summer sports, which is why I always preferred the ease of setting up the Winter Olympics version of this tracker instead.
Everything about the system is the same as in 2021 2020, except that the “Individual Neutral Athletes” team of Russians and Belarussians had its expected medals (based on those countries’ previous performance) reduced by 93% to reflect the fact that only a small fraction of those countries’ usual participants are competing in Paris.
This system also thinks the U.S. should have done better in 3x3 basketball, since it applies the overall American dominance in the sport to all variations of it. That might be unfair… but come on, we should probably be better at 3x3.