That link shows it both ways, total medals and weighted totals. I think the USA moved up from 59th to 50th after weighting.
As to the other question somebody posed about athletes for various countries having some training in the USA (during their college years mostly) this is true of Canadian track medallists in recent years but not for the rest of the team, they tend to stay home and train in Canada in sports like rowing and cycling where we’ve done well.
At the end of the day the national programs are probably fairly comparable to each other, a lot depends on the talent pool, you could have the best coaching and training but if you don’t have world class athletes they aren’t going to win medals at the Olympics.
Personally I think the IOC should ban China, if they think Russia is a bad country and have to compete under the Olympic Committee banner, then what about this slave-labor organ-harvesting dictatorship — they should not be invited nor should they be hosting Olympics. They have some great athletes but you have to wonder what pressures or threats are placed on them, and the coaches.
“That link shows it both ways, total medals and weighted totals. I think the USA moved up from 59th to 50th after weighting.”
Thanks for your reply, but I am a little puzzled. I think the link you are referring to is the original post, which also shows totals weighted by the greater importance of gold and silver medals, but I haven’t seen any lists, other than your own (#39), showing the rankings weighted by population size - per capita.
You probably already realize this, but you posted your list while I was still busy doing my calculations, so I made my post (#45) without having seen yours, otherwise it would have been slightly different.
I didn’t post my figures/lists as I expected they were slightly inaccurate (because of the discrepancies I mentioned in my second post (#47)). And there might be differences in population size: I used 34,009 for San Marino, whereas you used 11,310*3=33,930.
My first list, weighted by population but not medal value, showed the USA at 58th, compared to your 59th (confirming my figures are slightly inaccurate); but my second list, weighted by both population and medal value, showed the USA at 50th - so the same as yours.