The Olympic Charter, Chapter 1, section 6 states that: The Olympic Games are competitions between athletes in individual or team events and not between countries...[3]The Charter goes even further in Chapter 5, section 57, expressly prohibiting the IOC from producing an official ranking: The IOC and the OCOG shall not draw up any global ranking per country.
[10] It continues that "it has been the experience of all previous Olympic Games that the press of the world insist on exploiting the aspect of national rivalry by creating and publishing a wholly unofficial point score of their own devising, most often on the basis of 10, 5, 4, 3, 2, 1 points for the six places recognized on the table of honour".
[1] After London's successful bid to host the 2012 Olympics, UK Sport submitted a funding request to the Department for Culture, Media and Sport setting an "aspirational goal" of fourth place in the 2012 medals table, to be reviewed after the 2008 Olympics, for which a target of eighth place was set.
[19][20][21][22] This difference in rankings has its origins in the early days of the Olympics, when the IOC did not publish or recognise medal tables.
If the men's and women's swimming events are combined, there are ninety possible medals that can be achieved by success in the sport.
[27] It has also been noted that, with medals standing as an indicator of Olympic success, the current system acts as an incentive for countries to increase funding and support to individual sports.
[26] The Cold War brought considerable support for the adoption of a formal ranking system, with the top three countries being awarded overall gold, silver, and bronze medals at the closing ceremonies.
Sporting success predictions and ratings can be univariate, i.e. based on one independent variable, such as a country's population size and the number of medals is divided by the population of the country,[28][29] or multivariate, where resources-per-person in the form of GDP per capita and other variables are included.
Resources per person in the form of GDP per capita has been included in an article by The Guardian published during the 2012 Summer Olympics[29] and again by Google's News Lab for the Rio 2016 games.
[30][31] Already in 2002, the research done by Meghan Busse of Northwestern University suggested that both a large population and high per capita GDP are needed to generate high medal totals,[32] and predictive models have been built trying to predict success with multivariate analysis, taking also past results and host-nation advantage into account.
In response to the 2008 controversy over medal rank, Jeff Z. Klein in a New York Times blog post proposed a 4:2:1 system as a compromise between the total-medals and golds-first methods.