The other day I saw some old footage with athletes wearing CCCP on their uniform, the Cyrillic letters for USSR. It got me wondering how the old Soviet Union would be doing in the medal count if it was still together. So I did a quick count and posted it on Twitter.
The inevitable literalnet responded that not all the medals would have been won, because of team restrictions etc. But a few more interesting people replied with curiosity of how the Roman empire would do, or perhaps the British Empire.
Granted, an exhaustive survey would find out the origins of every athlete that medaled and then account for the team restrictions and who might have won if certain atheletes had been barred from medaling because of that. What I did took me too much time as it is, so this is not that and it’s not perfect.
However it is an amusing, at least to me, look at the medal count with old-timey empires put in for fun.
| Country | Gold | Silver | Bronze | Total |
| European Union | 67 | 88 | 75 | 230 |
| British empire | 51 | 41 | 54 | 146 |
| Roman empire (ca. 117) | 39 | 52 | 49 | 140 |
| USSR | 25 | 26 | 45 | 96 |
| USA | 34 | 22 | 25 | 81 |
| People’s Republic of China | 36 | 22 | 19 | 77 |
| Holy Roman Empire (ca. 1600) | 20 | 28 | 24 | 72 |
| Russian Federation | 11 | 19 | 22 | 52 |
| Great Britain | 22 | 13 | 13 | 48 |
Notes: I counted half the US medals in the British Empire since more than half of the US population lives in the old colonies. I also counted half of Italy for the Holy Roman Empire since only northern Italy was part of the time period I used. I also only used half of Great Britain’s medal count for the Roman Empire, since I really didn’t feel like digging up which of the medal winners were from Scotland and Northern Ireland (and possibly Wales and Cornwall etc. etc. if you *really* want to get sticky about it).
August 8th, 2012 at 10:41 pm
How about the number of medals the US would have if everyone who trained and lived in the US were competing for the US?
August 8th, 2012 at 11:05 pm
Great, now do Ghengis Khan’s Mongolia and Alexander’s Macedonia.
I suspect Temujin’s possession of all of China and Korea gives him the edge, with China having 36 Gold medals at the moment, and the combined Koreas adding another 16 Gold. Hungary and Kazakhstan both add another six Gold medals each, and I’m not even going to get into counting Russia’s 11, because I don’t know how much of that should be.
China, Korea, Kazakhstan, and Hungary combine for 64 gold medals, which is still below the EU, but add some of Russia, and other countries like Ukraine, Belarus, etc. and it should be over 70.
August 9th, 2012 at 6:16 am
Great fun Tom. Thanks.
This has great potential for extrapolation, refining and stimulating lots of discussion. It’s also wonderfully geeky!