Medal counting method issue revisited at Tokyo Games

China's gymnast, Guan Chenchen, reacts during the women's balance beam final of the Tokyo Olympic Games at the Ariake Gymnastics Centre, Tuesday. AFP-Yonhap

By Kang Seung-woo

With the Tokyo Olympics nearing their end, viewers are paying keen attention to which country will become the “unofficial” leader of the medal standings. The International Olympic Committee (IOC) does not keep an official medal count, so as to prohibit compromising the Olympic spirit.

So some people may have been confused after seeing Korea get ranked 12th on the chart of the official website of the Tokyo Games and other local websites, whereas some other sites, mainly from the United States, placed Korea at 11th, on Thursday.

Such different medal tally rankings were also found for other countries, as China sat atop the medal tally on most sports sites, while U.S.-based sites showed that the U.S. was the leader in the medal standings.

“I am a little bit bewildered to see the different counting methods,” said Yu Jin-hee, who described himself as a sports aficionado. “I was hoping that the medal rankings would be shown in a standardized way for viewers to easily recognize who is leading the medal tally.”

In the past, whenever the Summer or Winter Olympics have taken place, the medal counting method has been a thorny issue, raising questions over which method ― based on either the number of overall medals or the number of gold medals as the standard ― is right.

Predictably, South Korea fully backs the gold medal standard, as its athletes specialize in a limited number of events, like archery and taekwondo, but have hardly any hopes for medals in hardware-heavy track and field events.

By comparison, major U.S. sports media like NBC, The New York Times and Yahoo Sports, rank the countries by their overall medal counts.

However, critics point out that the mixed medal-based ranking system practiced in the U.S., is unconventional and fails to align with the practice of the IOC, which ranks countries by their number of gold medals.

U.S. sprinters Noah Lyles, left, and Kenneth Bednarek celebrate after the men's 200-meter final at the Tokyo Olympics, Wednesday. AP-Yonhap

In fact, China's fans and commentators have taken to social media to complain about the common practice in the U.S. news media of tabulating Olympic medals by the total number of medals instead of by the medal types, according to Newsweek.

“The counting method has annoyed some followers of the Tokyo 2020 Olympics, including in China, where social media users are accusing U.S. news outlets of bias and being deliberately spiteful,” Newsweek said.

In addition, a Yahoo Sports column also said that the overall medal-based table was “ridiculous,” as the rest of the world, including the IOC, favors tallying medals according to the number of golds over anything else.

However, people have mixed opinions on the medal counting method.

“We have to acknowledge that people care about gold medals the most,” Yu said.

Song Young-rock, a diehard sports fan, said, “Calculating a country's ranking based on only the number of gold medals won discounts the overall efforts of that country's athletes.”