Olympic Tables

We've all been watching the Games and have our own thoughts on the state of UK Athletics, what was wrong with the relay teams, etc, etc but the League Table of medals seemed fairly objective. Well if you go to www.c4news.com you get a variety of tables. For instance, the USA Ordering ranks countries according to the total number of medals won - well surprise, surprise, the USA leads the world! They also have tables which take into account the Human Rights records of the various counntries, which factor in the countries' GDP and so on. BUT

the one which I like is the one which gives points for medals won (three for gold, two for silver and one for bronze) and then dividing the result by the population of the country the top six in order are Jamaica, Slovenia, Bahrain, Australia, New Zealand and Estonia with none of the top three in the first ten!

Incidentally, none of the three Brits who won gold to start with were receiving any funding from the sport. Christine O was dumped from the scheme at the time of the appeals, etc; High Jumper Mason has a Jamaican mother living in Britain, a British father living in Jamaica and he goes to Jamaica all winter to train with his old coach and he had already won medals at international meetings as a Jamaican before coming to the UK - so no funding for him; and Natasha Danvers Smith lives in Los Angeles and is coached by her American husband - no funding there either! So what happened to all the money that athletics got - more than any other sport? Well to start with £600,000 went on the men's sprint relay team over the past four years....

Just some thoughts....