Good morning, John. Every four years, I forget how much I love the Olympics and that I remember, like six days in and am super sad that I missed half of the Olympics. Cause I think that I'm like a stick in the mud, but actually I'm a total sucker for humans being awesome.

In my following of the Olympics and the surrounding discourse, I appear to have uncovered an olympic mystery that is very cool, that no one seems to know about and that I cannot explain. And I uncovered this mystery because of silly Twitter discourse. So we're gonna have to talk about Twitter a little bit in this video. I'm sorry. From my day two of the Olympics, I started seeing arguments about whether to rank countries in the Olympics by the number of gold medals won or the number of total medals won, or some third thing that ranked the medals somehow. And this is actually not what the mystery is about, but it's part of the story of how I uncovered it.

Now, it turns out that the US and China ended up tying in gold medals, literally, in part because this french basketball player's toe was on the three point line for a buzzer beater shot. And so in the end, it doesn't matter. It makes sense that we would move to silver and bronze to break the tie, and so the US wins. But then earlier this week, I saw this tweet, which then inspired this tweet. I love when Americans address us all as Europeans, as if we're all one big country. If that were the case, Europe, the country would have 116 gold, 122 silver, and 160 bronze medals. And this is just bound to get the discourse really stirred because it overlaps with other previous discourse about how Americans don't understand Europe and Europe doesn't understand America, inspiring more tweets about how different the states are. I'm like, no. Until people in Connecticut are speaking Connecticutian, you will not be able to convince me that states are as different from each other as European countries. But that's a completely different argument. Back to the metal thing.

When I read this tweet, the first thing my mind thought was, well, Europe has way more people than the US, which it does, especially continental Europe, which has around 750 million people, which, you know, I guess that most Americans would get that wrong, but whatever. But Europe did still get more gold medals per capita than the US, even without Russia competing with 0.15 gold medals per million people to the US's twelve. And that's, like, interesting, but also maybe not unexpected that it would be a bit higher because each country only gets to send three athletes per event. And continental Europe is lots of countries. Now that might not seem like it should matter, because the best is still the best. And so whoever would win the gold medal wins, no matter how big the field of competitors is. But, like, there are some sports that have more and less randomness built into them. Especially given that there might be weird, random circumstances like shot putting in the rain or getting Covid two days before your event. So there is probably some, but not a ton of benefit to having more athletes in the pool. 

But here's the thing. None of this matters. Ranking countries by medals is ridiculous. And, like, I get that it's a fine kind of ridiculous, but it's ridiculous. Countries don't win gold, metals, individual humans do. We create the ranking because we like it, not because it means something. Which is why I think it is fine for the US to use total medals if it puts them on top, and the rest of the world to use the gold medal rank, because neither thing means much. While I was making this video, I found somebody who ranked the countries not by how many medals they got, but by the total value of the metal in the medals, which is, as far as I can tell, just as good of a way to do it as any of the other ways. And also, the US still wins.

There's just so many things that matter here. Population size, infrastructure, level of affluence. Also stuff as simple as the number of events that athletes can compete in. Like, there's only men and women's pole vault, but in swimming there's different strokes and different race lengths and men and women's for each of those strokes and race lengths. There's 37 swimming events in the Olympics. And yes, it is weird that it's an odd number. You get to figure that one out on your own. And it turns out that the US is really good in swimming. Like, in part because we have a lot of swimming pools and we also have a lot of schools with Olympic regulation pools and swim teams that compete all throughout high school and college. So we're really good at swimming. And there are lots of opportunities to win medals at swimming, which is why, like, eight of our 40 gold medals are in swim events. And Michael Phelps ended up with 23 gold medals, which is two times more than anyone else who has ever existed.

My point is, this is interesting, but it's not that illustrative. But I think there is something that might be very illustrative, something that might teach us something about the world and that isn't explained by any of this, and something that no one has talked about, and something I desperately want to explain.

So did you notice something interesting about that guy's tweet? Europe won 116 gold, 122 silver, and 160 bronze medals. That's 0.21 bronze medals per million people, way more than the US's. The US was actually super consistent. It was like 40, 44, 42, while China was much more heavily weighted toward gold, winning 40 gold medals, 27 silver, and 24 bronze. I found this, interesting, and so I actually checked. I went too far down the rabbit hole, and it's not a 2024 fluke. In 2021, countries in continental Europe won 114 gold medals and 155 bronze. In 2016, 113 gold medals, 139 bronze. In 2012, 108 gold medals, 138 bronze. I don't need to go through the whole thing with you. Here's a graph of the last 20 years of Olympic games showing the gold, silver, and bronze medals from continental Europe. 

There is always significantly more bronze, and this is very different from the gold medal versus total medal conversation, because it controls for a bunch of stuff. This isn't an effect of a sport having more events or a country having more people or being more affluent. It's the same group of countries over and over, and it's comparing the same events that happened in any given year, but every Olympics for the last 20 years, possibly longer. I just got bored. Shows continental Europe having significantly more bronze medals than gold medals. I can think of a few reasons why this might be the case. My anchor is always that, like, money and socioeconomic status usually explains most things. So it seems somewhat likely to me that less affluent countries are more likely to be able to identify and invest in the most elite athletes, but have less ability to invest in, like, people a little bit further down the ranks. And that's somewhat borne out by China's numbers, which are pretty heavily weighted toward gold. But the US is an affluent nation, and it shows pretty much no correlation year to year between gold, silver, and bronze. And, yeah, I know I spent way too much time on this. I think there is also a possibility that the increased numbers of athletes who come from European countries weight them more toward bronze, which might actually be a more randomized medal.

Placing gold might just be a better judge of who is first, because gold medal winners are more likely to be truer outliers, while bronze medal recipients are closer to the middle of the pack. And so randomness might play a bigger role, which would mean that having a larger number of athletes gives you more bronze medal winners and more athletes is what you get when you lump a bunch of countries together. But it might be something else. Like, I don't know. I don't even know how to know. Like, I wouldn't know how to design the study. I wouldn't know how to do the statistics. All I know is that because of, like, some snarky discourse tweet, I got curious about something and seemed to have uncovered a true phenomenon, like, a thing that exists and that I would love for someone to write a full research paper on. I'd especially love that because I did not have time to check my work.

John, I'll see you on Tuesday.

Thanks for coming with me on this journey. I think it was strange. John, thanks for sharing your spy story. I don't know why I didn't get a spy. I never got a spy. I guess you explained adequately. I'm glad it was you, though, because I might have been like, yeah, I want to be an asset and a threat.

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