Number Crunching: The Olympic Medal Table

 The 2016 Olympic Games will come to an end as this weekend also comes to an end. In UK time, the closing ceremony will start, as far as I can make out from the time table, at 8pm on Sunday night local time in Rio, and that I think is about midnight in the UK, so really as far as we can see, the fireworks will be finished for early breakfast time to us Brits.  

We have been shown the medal table every day and when I last looked Great Britain was in second place behind the USA. I had a quick check to see just how amazingly good that it by comparing the population figures. If we say that the UK population is a little over 65,000,000 right now, we should be quite extraordinarily proud of our athletes, since the population of the USA is roughly 318,000.000. Even with my poor grasp on maths, (The poetry, history and geography teachers wrote the kindest things on my school reports) means they have nearly five times more people in their country. Yet they have not won quite double the amount of medals as our young people have gathered in. That is more than impressive and I hope inspiring to the youth of our country.

Our little island stands directly above China on the table at this point and it would take a greater mind than mine to work out the difference between us and that enormous country’s population figures that must be changing like the waves on the shore but I wrote down from internet information that there were 1,357 Billion people a few years ago. 

The table below will already be out of date because of the latest events but it shows the figures I have been writing about.  

Country	Gold	Silver	Bronze	Total
USA	38	35	32	105
GBR	24	22	14	60
China	22	18	25	65

 

I have been feeling a degree under for about a month now and missed a number of training sessions for that reason. As I join some friends tonight in a little local social event at the Lido in Arundel put on by Tuff Fitty Triathlon Club, it should be easy-peasy but who can say. The format will be:  

1km run

200 metres swim

1km run

200 mtr swim

1km run 

 

I will try to think of the superb Alistair and Jonny Brownlee destroying the rest of the Triathlon field in Rio to win the Gold and the Silver medal. I hope a can be forgiven for changing a few of the great Bard's words as I did in front of our TV at home yesterday; ‘Now is the winter of our discontent, made glorious summer by these Sons of York’.