Record Records - Part 12: the Summer Olympic Games
With the Paris 2024 Games less than a fortnight away*, here’s a bumper bonus edition of Olympic achievements to get you excited, or more excited as the case may be. The Olympics is the ultimate stage for sporting glory, especially sports not as beloved in the intervening non-leap years. Let’s dive (and sprint, swim, etc., you get it) into some truly remarkable Olympic records.
*if you’re reading this after the 2024 Games, I hope you were excited anyway, and hey, maybe this can get you pumped for next time. Though, some of the records may not be records any more I guess. Sorry I can’t better cater for you future readers, the cruelty of linear time progression I suppose.
For other articles in this series, so far we’ve covered:
the many records of Tom Brady
the incredible feats of Wilt Chamberlain
an intro to cricket stats and the parallel achievements of Shane Warne and Muthiah Muralidaran
a discussion on the unparalleled dominance of Captain Meg Lanning
a delve into the remarkable peak of Eric Dickerson
the intertwined and astonishing careers of Lionel Messi and Cristiano Ronaldo
a look at the world of ice hockey and its statistical dominance by Wayne Gretzky
Since the inception of this series of pieces covering incredible sporting achievements, I have longed to turn my attention to the Olympic Games. The proper ones of course, the Summer Games. I mean, the Winter Games have their place, but the Summer Games are the real deal in terms of pageantry, attendance, prestige, and supposed symmetry with their ancient name sake. I love the Summer Olympic Games. Even before my sporting fandom renaissance in my early adulthood, when my interest in professional sport was basically zero, I still followed and adored the Olympics. Something about the international community caring so much about who is the pinnacle at a given athletic discipline really appeals to me. Sports and pursuits that for 47 out of 48 months I don’t care about are suddenly captivating. The commentators and production mean that I can be 100% oblivious of badminton one day and a couch analyst criticising a player the next.
The narratives that unfold across the multi-week event, both for individuals and nations, are so captivating. I suppose I’ve always been more interested in international sport in general, and nothing is more international than the Olympics. And, when you bring thousands of athletes together over a month and try to see who’s the best in dozens of sporting events, well, you’ve also got the perfect conditions for my other favourite aspect of sport: lots of data. So, with the Paris 2024 Games less than a fortnight away (at time of writing), what better time than to delve into some of the most impressive examples so far witnessed within that Olympic data collection.
As opposed to my normal approach, exploring a given athlete (or pair of athletes on two occasions) and all the ways they were exceptional, today is going to be a collection of different incredible Olympic achievements. We’re going to explore two records associated with speed, two regarding unbeatable quantities of medals (one individual and one national), as well as two exploring records regarding time. I will however stay true to form and also say a quick word on unbreakable-ness (totally a word), and explore all 6 records chances of falling at this upcoming iteration in Paris, or any future Olympic Games for that matter.
Let’s start with a little bit of context so the upcoming records can be appreciated for how insane they really are.
The Ancient Olympic Games
Now, just to be clear, I’m not going to do a full history lesson here, though that would be fun. No, I simply want to give a little bit of background to explain why certain modern events are held in higher regard than others. If you want more background on the original games, than I highly recommend the currently airing series on the fantastic podcast channel: Our Fake History, by Sebastian Major. That’s where I learned about the Nazis inventing the Olympic torch tradition, as we’ll cover in a bit. Our Fake History is one my favs, and I love that he also released an Olympic themed piece ahead of the Paris Games.
The original Games of Olympia were not stand alone, they were within a set of 4 sporting competitions held in the ancient Greek world, rotating between them throughout a 4 year cycle, the other events being:
the Pythian Games in honour of Apollo, held in Delphi
the Nemean Games in honour of Zeus (as were the Olympic Games), in Nemea
and the Isthmian Games in honour of Poseidon, as you might expect, in Isthmia
These panhellenic games (as they are referred to now) were contested for centuries, with the longest running being the games of Olympia, also the biggest deal for ancient athletes to win. The original Olympic games were celebrated (almost) every 4 years for a truly staggering 1,000+ years. And that’s just the written records, archaeology supports them running even longer, possibly for 1,200 years.
Map courtesy of Wikipedia
Only male Greek citizens were eligible to participate as athletes, they had to compete naked, and the list of events contested was considerably fewer than the modern adaptation. Such was the prestige of the Olympic games to the Greek identity, that when the up and coming King Philip II of Macedon (the father of a guy we call Alexander the Great) was trying to boost his cred, he fought very hard to have Macedonians allowed in the games. If Macedonians could participate in the Olympics, then Phillip was chipping away at the perceived status difference between Greece and his realm.
Did the Modern Games make the right call in breaking from ancient nude tradition? You tell me:
According to the earliest traditions of the games foundation, it was originally just a single footrace that was contested, the Stade, which is where we get our modern word for stadium. So, the be-all and end-all of the Olympic games was a sprint, and best estimates put it at a little under 200 m. Throughout the millennia of iterations of ancient games, the stade was the principal event, the results of which were also included in the famous pentathlon.
Not long later, a double stade race was introduced (think the 400 m these days), and not long after that a much longer race, and then followed by the pentathlon and wrestling. Over the centuries more events would be added, but I think these earliest games really go a long way to explain the disproportionate value we place in the modern games on the 100 m and 200 m sprints, along with the other sports considered within athletics in general. They represent the strongest connection to the heart of the original Olympic Games, and the modern games are nothing if not about capturing the feel of an ancient tradition.
The later events to be added to the original games in Olympia included:
Chariot racing
Horse racing
Boxing
Mule and mule cart racing (bring back the mule races!)
the Hoplite Stade, which is the regular stade sprint but wearing ancient greek armour with a huge shield. Yes, let’s add that to the modern games I say
Various versions of the above including slowly introducing specific contests of each for boys as well as men
That’s it. The pentathlon included things you would associate with naked ancient Greek warriors, javelin throw, discus throw, long jump, the stade, and wrestling. There was no swimming, no rowing or sailing, no weightlifting, despite all of those being a part of ancient Greek life. There also was no Olympic torch, which I was disappointed to discover is a modern addition to add a sense of ancient ritual. I mean, the over the top pageantry of the games is one of the things that helps it stand out from other sporting events, so I’m all for it, and I guess it succeeded in feeling genuine in that I was surprised it was a modern invention. And invented by the Nazis no less! But we don’t have time for that side-story.
So, this is all to say that the ancient games were significantly more humble in terms of events contested, vastly more exclusive in terms of participants and even spectators, but still represented the pinnacle of athletic competition in its time and place as well as that idea of a sporting community. There was the Olympic truce after all, where all the major Greek City States agreed to not fight each other during the games. So that’s pretty cool, even if it didn’t play out that way in theory every time...
The last ancient games happened during Roman rule, probably in the 4th century CE. This means the gap between the end of the ancient games and their revival is even longer than the massive 1,200 years they ran for in the first place. It was more like 1,500 years, when the Committee to Revive the Olympic Games formed in the late 1800s. Bringing us to:
The Modern Olympic Games
Revived in 1896, the Modern Olympic Games has had 29 iterations already, 30 including the upcoming Paris 2024 event. 30 games hosted by 23 different cities across 19 countries. Paris was the first city to host multiple games, doing so in 1900 and 1924, but has had to wait 100 years to join London as the only cities to host 3 times. There are a few others to have hosted twice, including Los Angeles, Athens, and Tokyo, with the latter also the first Asian nation to host the games, with the 1964 event. My Australian pride was raised learning that the first games hosted in the Southern Hemisphere was the 1956 Melbourne version, and we remain the only country below the equator with multiple events (thanks to the Sydney 2000 games).
France and the UK have had 3 each, but the USA comes out on top (get used to that in regards to Olympic records by the way) with 4 events held so far, and a 5th scheduled for 2028. The 4 so far in the USA, along with the 2 in Tokyo, 2 in Australia, and 1 each in China, Mexico, Canada, Korea, and Brazil, represent a total of 13 Modern Games hosted outside of Europe, the other 17 (when we include 2024), or, 56%, being held in that geographically small but culturally dense continent.
By contrast to the ancient games as we just discussed, the modern games have so, so many events, and participation is super inclusive. It wasn’t always, but over the decades the number of male and female participants have evened up, and the total number of athletes involved and medals on offer has only grown. Check this out:
And:
The most recent two iterations of the modern games each saw over 11,000 athletes representing over 200 nations! Hot damn! On top of that, modern sports science and increasing physical prowess on average across professional sports means modern competitors have never been more physically impressive. So, when the contestants are better than ever, and the number of contestants contesting has never been higher, any records that stand the test of time are truly remarkable. Especially those considered more “pure” events like athletics. In the age of sports science, surely records regarding how fast someone can run, or how high or far someone can jump, or how far someone can throw something, surely these records must fall every 4 years? Surely every iteration of the games someone wins even more medals than ever before. Well, spoiler alert, we will see that these are not the case in practice. Individual brilliance still trumps the average increase of sporting prowess. So with all that context in place, let’s start with the events most closely related to the ancient version of the Olympics, the events to determine who are the fastest in the world.
Fastest Man and Fastest Woman: Usain and Florence
The 100 m sprint is a concentrated microcosm of what makes the Olympics great. Its history goes back to at least 760 BC, and the very word we use for sporting venues, the stadium, comes from the distance run in the original Olympic games version of the sprint, the Stade. Now, they were doing it in the nude, but the modern interpretation is still the most explosive and (I think) captivating event of the games. It’s all over in like 10 seconds, and the 200 m version isn’t much more.
There’s just something very ancient, very primal about a bunch of bipeds getting together to see who can run the fastest on those funny two legs of ours. We may have irrevocably altered the planet with the tools we’ve created, but we first made our mark as a species by running on two legs, either very fast or for a very long time. This sets us apart from all other mammals. Nothing else in our biological class can run on 2 legs like we do. Thus the sprint and the marathon have so much prestige. And, side note, another classic example of our obsession with Greek culture is that we still call it a marathon, and that the distance is set to equal that of the famous tale.
As we alluded to before, you would be forgiven in thinking that the fastest humans should be those who are the fastest as of you reading this. I mean, bigger, faster, stronger as a sporting world every year right? This thinking is what I believe makes the records we are about to explore all the more impressive. Yes, Usain Bolt is a very modern athlete, he only retired in the last half dozen years, but his 200 m sprint record was set in 2008, and is so, so far ahead of what the current generation of sprinters can achieve. More impressively is the fastest woman, because Florence Griffith Joyner’s record for the 200 m sprint was set in 1988 and still stands! And it’s not even close. Plus, she had the record for the 100 m sprint (also set in 1988) until Tokyo 2020! Where it was beaten by 0.01 seconds. That blows my mind.
Alright, enough of that, let’s get the actual data. First, the women, here are the top fastest ever Olympic sprint results women’s 100 m and 200 m events:
In case you forgot, Jamaica really likes sprinting…
Look how far ahead Florence Griffith Joyner (or Flo-Jo) is in the 200 m, and how far ahead she was in the 100 m before Elaine just pipped her in 2020. It’s astonishing to me that a result from 1988 can still be the fastest ever Olympic 200 m sprint. Though, as we will see later, it’s not the oldest standing Olympic record. And just look at the 200 m results again, Elaine Thompson-Herah and Florence Griffith Joyner account for 5 of the top 10! And only 2 countries are represented. If you’re good at sprinting, you’re really good I guess.
Ok, now for the men:
Not quite as Jamaican heavy as the women, except for where it counts
Usain Bolt has the top 2 results for both events. He’s the only athlete, men or women, to win back-to-back gold medals in both the 100 m and 200 m sprints in consecutive Olympic Games.
The recent sporting prowess argument kind of bears out here, I mean, 6 of the top results for the 100 m sprint and 3 for the 200 m were set in the most recent 2 versions of the Games. But, they are so far behind the top spot, especially the 2012 Bolt 100 m race, that is a World Record we might never see equalled. Also it’s one of history’s great poetic coincidences that the fastest human ever recorded has Bolt as their family name.
Here is his remarkable record sprint for your viewing pleasure, with Flo-Jo’s equally insane 1988 record as well:
Apologies for the video quality, I was surprised myself.
Ok, now on to two records regarding age.
Oldest Records and Youngest Gold Medalists
There are different aspects that can make an impressive record so impressive. It can be the fact that it’s impossibly far ahead of its peers, as we saw with Bolt and Flo-Jo. It can also be remarkable for standing the test of time, being unrepeatable despite generations of athletes trending upwards on average in their prowess. This we also saw with Flo-Jo, but will explore more here. But, before we do, another way that a record can be impressive is the context of who is performing the feat. An athlete you wouldn’t expect to do well in fact doing so adds a layer of impressiveness to an achievement. In this case, as given away in the section heading, I’m alluding to very young Olympians coming up with Gold medals.
When we think of Olympians, well, at least for me, we think of athletes in their prime. The Usain Bolt’s and Michael Phelps's of the world. Inspiring athletes at the peak of physical prowess. And for the most part this is true. But, and this is where the interesting angle and justification for inclusion here comes about, it’s not always the case. There have been hundreds of Olympic participants over the years who were legally children at the time. But I’m not talking, it’s a few weeks till their 18th birthday children, there have been 13 year old medalists! So, who has the record for youngest athlete to win gold at the Olympics?
Actually, quick note on that one, why do we care so much about gold? Surely just getting a medal is great right? Well, in another nod to the ancient games, gold medals have so much more gravitas and prestige than their silver and bronze counterparts. The ancients didn’t even do medals like that, it was a crown of leaves bestowed on the winner of a given event, and the winner only. The athletes of the original games were believers in that modern phrase that 2nd place is just the first loser. Now, in the modern games this is not the case, silver and bronze medals are still highly lauded, and the “winner” of a given Olympic games medal tally is often argued as the country with the most medals, not the most golds, though it’s often the same country. So, while there have been many young athletes to win a medal at the Olympics, I want to know who the youngest gold medalist ever is.
Which brings us to the data. I actually found it relatively tricky to get a conclusive list of the youngest gold medalists. The absolute youngest was easy, well done Marjorie Gestring who won a gold medal in the diving event of the 1936 Berlin games at the age of just 13 years and 268 days. Which is nuts by the way. Here she is on the podium:
But I wanted to find the full list of gold medalists under 15 years old. I had to go to several incomplete lists to get the answer, but I think I found them all. If you know of any athlete to win gold under the age of 15 who I don’t have here, please let me know. From what I can gather though, it looks like an exclusive club, a total of just 14 athletes to ever manage a gold medal win aged under 15, here they are:
As you can see, or if not as I’m about to tell you, the vast majority of our child gold medalists were competing in swimming. But surprisingly (at least to me), they are pretty well spread out across the eras. Thanks to skateboarding being introduced in Tokyo 2020, we have 4 gold medalists aged under 14, and they were in 1936, 1960, 1992, and 2020. I really thought that as sports became more professional and more intense the chance of a 13 or 14 year old being competitive would diminish. But 2 of our 14 in that list were in the most recent Olympic Games! I mean, when I was 13 I was utterly useless at basically everything, imagine winning Olympic gold more than 4 years before you can vote! (should you live in such a country). Gerstring was the first 13 year old to win a gold, and still the youngest to this day. She only just takes out the top spot too, with Klaus Zerta, the coxswain of the German rowing team in 1960 only being a few weeks older when he received a gold.
With those super overachievers out of the way, let’s look at longevity instead. If more athletes from more countries are competing than ever before, how long can a record really hope to stand? Well, for the most part, not very long. Every version of the Olympics has seen lots and lots of records fall. But, importantly for this article, some have managed to linger. Now, I’m not talking about obscure loopholes providing super long standing records. I mean, cricket was contested in the 1900 Olympics and not since, so technically Alfred Bowerman’s score of 59 runs in the second innings is the highest ever Olympic cricket score and therefore a 124 year old record.
But I want to know about records that have a chance to be broken every games, those are the ones that are impressive if they manage to stand unbeaten across the decades. So I combed through every Olympic record that currently exists and has been contestable for the majority of games since the end of the 2nd World War. I then sorted them by the year the record was set. For this exercise I omitted team sports, which if I’m being honest I don’t really think have a place in the Olympics, not that I don’t enjoy them all the same. This doesn’t mean I omitted the 8-person rowing event but including the single sculls by the way, I did include all rowing, swimming, running, shooting, archery, etc., even if multiple athletes were involved. All I meant was that I didn’t include hockey, basketball, football, and so on.
Ok, so what were the results? Sure enough most of the records were indeed set at the Tokyo 2020 games (actually happened in 2021 but everyone calls it Tokyo 2020 so whatever), vindicating the perspective that athletes just keep getting better. But, thankfully for the premise of this article, there are some notable and incredible records that still stand decades later. We’ve already discussed Florence Griffith Joyner, who’s 200 m sprint record from 1988 is still well ahead of any result since. That same year also had a hammer throw by Russian athlete Sergey Litvinov that still stands as the best at an Olympics. Indeed no-one at any event has thrown farther than Sergey Litvinov or his compatriot and peer Yuriy Sedykh since the 1980s. There are a handful of others that are still standing from the 80s, but there is one insane record that trumps them all. To get there, let’s check out the full list, which I put a little more effort into than usual while producing. While you watch this, remember that each little square represents one event’s best ever Olympic record being set that year, and that the pictures shown are examples of the athletes from that year whose records still stand to this day.
There he is. Bob Beamon and his 1968 long jump. That year the games were held in Mexico City, by far the highest altitude of any games to date. The vast majority of Olympic venues are at sea level or a little above, whereas Mexico City has a crazy altitude of 2,240 m. That’s more than 2 km above sea level! To put it in perspective, the highest spot in all of Australia is 2,228 m, 12 meters less. Sure, we’re not known for our lofty peaks (geographically anyway), but still, this shows just how high Mexico City is situated. This had a marked impact on the games, with many athletics records falling. Beamon himself was astonished by his jump, which broke the world record at the time by a huge margin (55 cm!). His jump would remain the longest ever for more than 20 years, before being beaten by just 5 cm at an athletics world championship in 1991. But it hasn’t been beaten yet at an Olympics, and while you can point to the venue as having an impact, no other record from the 1968 Mexico games has lasted, just that one perfect jump by Beamon. A lot of the records that still stand from the 80s surprised me, but having an athletics best ever result still standing since the 60s is just awesome.
Alright, we’ve covered the fastest humans, the youngest gold winners, and the longest lasting records. Let’s finish with the big guns, the most decorated athlete and his contribution to the most dominant nation of the Olympics:
Ridiculous amounts of medals: Michael Phelps and the United States of America
Winning a gold medal is often reported as the pinnacle of an athlete’s entire professional career, and sometimes their life as a whole. And you can see why, with so many thousands of athletes competing, winning one is statistically unlikely. Not to mention the even more unlikely path of making it to the games at all. But some athletes are just that extra level above their peers, to the point where winning a gold medal isn’t the pinnacle, because they win lots. And, many events on offer at the games require similar skill sets, so the opportunity to win multiple medals increases if you’re in the right discipline. I mean, if you’re good at archery, you’re going to be entering the individual and team events, not to mention that there are several versions of both the individual and team events. If you’re a naturally gifted swimmer, odds are you’ll do well across the different disciplines within that collection of events. Which brings us to the most decorated Olympian of all time. Michael “can’t stop showing off” Phelps.
Michael Phelps has won so many medals it’s just plain silly. I mean, let’s look at the competition. How many athletes do you think have managed to win 10 Olympic medals in their careers? Not gold mind you, any medal counts for this question. The answer is 33. Of the hundreds of thousands of athletes to participate in the Olympic Games, 33 have won 10 or more medals. But increase that threshold by just 1, and the number of athletes drops to 22. Filter out a few more, the number of athletes with 12 or more medals is 15, and the number with 13 or more is just 6. The athlete with the 2nd most medals ever is the legendary Russian gymnast Larisa Latynina, who won 18 medals in her illustrious career. Michael Phelps? He won 28. TWENTY EIGHT! And, to make this all the more silly: of Latynina’s 18 medals, 9 of them were gold, for Phelps? Of his 28 medals 23 were gold. What?! He has more gold medals than any other athlete has total medals. If he was his own country he would be equal 37th on the all time gold medal list, tied with Ethiopia and 2 golds ahead of Argentina. Here are some other countries with less gold medals than Michael Phelps:
India
Mexico
Austria
Indonesia
Over 150 others
Here is the actual data for your enjoyment:
And zooming in on the more elite club of 13 or more medals:
Which just gets all the more impressive when we break it down by medal type:
Honestly, Phelps having more golds than any other athlete has total medals is just crazy. No athlete has ever managed to crack the 10 gold medal mark, except Phelps, with 23.
And he’s just as much a show-off when we look at most medals won in a single Olympic Games. I mean, he had to be, how can you have that many in a career without some seriously impressive individual showings. Here are the only athletes to ever manage a 6+ medal haul in a single Games:
The highlighted ones are Phelps. Yup, only thrice has someone accrued 8 in a games, and two of those were Phelps. I mean, competing in 4 Olympics is very impressive in terms of staying on top of your discipline for so long, but for all 4 of those appearances to be in the exclusive club of only 33 athletes to ever do 6 or more medals in one Games, that’s wild. His 2008 Olympic effort was particularly nuts, where he didn’t just win 8 medals, he won 8 Golds:
Get out of here Michael Phelps.
When it comes to Olympic medal winners, he is the ultimate statistical outlier. Even the semi-mythical ancient games don’t provide a rival, with the most successful of the ancient Olympians we know of, Leonidas of Rhodes (not that Leonidas) famously winning all three running events available to him for 4 consecutive Olympics (eat your heart out Bolt). This earned him the equivalent of 12 gold medals, just over half of Phelps’ haul. Though, unfairly, Phelps did compete in several different styles and distances of swimming, as well as team combo versions of the same. But, if the modern game provides more opportunities for medals, no-one has made the most of them quite like Michael Phelps.
Such a wanky picture, but undeniably awesome.
The thing that’s most annoying about Michael Phelps' utter domination of the medal tally records, is that it’s not like his country needs them. If he was born in China for example, he would have personally helped them leapfrog the United Kingdom for most golds of all-time. But no, he competed for team USA. And I think using Michael Phelps as a standard measure of medals won really helps illustrate how dominant the USA have been.
If you evenly distributed 5 Michael Phelps worth of golds and total medals away from the USA, would they lose their number 1 spot? Nope. What about 10? 15? Haha, nope. If you combine Russia’s medals from both their Soviet era and the post Soviet Olympics, you would still need to subtract 20 Michael Phelps worth of Golds for USA to lose number 1, and a crazy 36 Micahel Phelps worth of total medals for USA to lose that number 1. Remember that the majority of countries ever to compete in the Olympics don’t even have 1 Michael Phelps worth.
You know what, that’s getting confusing. Here are the numbers:
So, not exactly close…
As we can see, only two countries have more total medals than the USA has just gold medals. And for those two I am being generous, combining Russia with USSR and for Germany I’m combining pre-WW2 Germany, post-WW2 East and West Germany, and modern post unification Germany. Considering the respective populations, Germany has a very strong showing. But if population was what mattered, China and India would top the tallies every year. That said, few of the top 10 are small nations, Australia and Sweden are outliers, the only countries in the top 10 with populations below 50 million (and for Sweden, way below 50 million). Looking at the countries that make up the top 20, they are all either very well developed (high on the humanity index), or very large economically, or occasionally both. The USA is in the top 5 of the world’s population, but of those 5 has by far and away the highest GDP per capita. They are large and wealthy, as opposed to just one or the other.
And they haven’t just dominated recently, they have dominated for the history of the modern Olympic Games. I wanted to approach the issue of historic domination via more than just total medals, looking also in terms of how well a given country has done at each games. So, using the gold/silver/bronze approach, I looked at the top 3 places of the medal tally for each Olympic Games. Or, which nation received the total Olympic gold, silver, and bronze medals for a given games if you will. From this, I got the staggering result that the USA have been in the top 3 of the medal tally in 28 out of 29 Olympic Games. That one year they weren’t? That was the 1980 Moscow games when the USA (and the majority of its allies) boycotted the games in protest of the Russian invasion of Afghanistan at the time. Which by the way, protesting invading Afghanistan, pretty funny foreshadowing by the USA there...
But to avoid wading further into those murky waters, let's turn back to the results. If the USA were top 3 a total of 28 times, how does that compare? Well, Russia also boycotted an Olympic games, with them and all their Soviet-bloc allies revenge abstaining from the following iteration, the 1984 L.A. games. But despite this, they are the next best country, making the top 3 a total of 13 times. 13, compared to 28! And it gets all the more absurd when we compare the number of times atop the tally, i.e., the number of times a country “won” the Olympics. Well, Russia are again second at that, doing so 6 times. The USA on the other hand have managed it only 18 times. Wait what? USA have been number 1 on the tally more often than Russia have even managed top 3. USA have been number 1 on the tally for well over half of the Olympic Games ever. Closer to two thirds. In fact, no country other than Russia or USA have managed the feat more than once:
In other words:
And, for posterity, here is the full list of countries to make the top 3 of an Olympic medal tally:
Honestly, the USA are the Michael Phelps of nations. Or maybe he was the USA of athletes? Whatever.
I also looked at how many medals were on offer at each of the games so I could find out not only who placed in the top 3 but how large a percentage of the medals on offer they placed in. The best of which? You’d be forgiven for thinking it must have been Russia in Moscow or the USA in Los Angeles, after all, the two were pretty evenly matched medal tally wise during the Cold War so surely during either boycott the tally would have swung towards the host? Heck, even the Simpsons made light of it, in one of my favourite bits from that show:
But no, it wasn’t Russia in 1980 or the USA in 1984. By then the number of competing countries had ballooned to close to modern levels, and the number of medals on offer was massive due to the rise of included events and permutations of those events. To win the highest percentage of medals, you need to go back to 1904, only the 3rd iteration of the Modern Games and the first time the USA hosted one. With the extra athletes the host gets, coupled with (compared to today) very few countries involved, and many countries unable to afford the travel for too many athletes, the USA went absolutely bananas. To set the stage, first check out how many medals have been available over the years:
That’s hard to read because it’s too much text in the data, but you get the idea from the trend. Also, that’s not the raw total medals given, it’s the number of unique events awarded a medal. It’s not recording every athlete to get a medal as many events give out medals to all the team members, which is a lot, think football, or the 8 team rowing. Now, check out the nations that have won the most medals (again, most events really) in a single Olympics:
First off, more evidence of US dominance as we see that 6 of the top 12 are American, including 2 of the top 3. Also you’ll see that those boycott games do provide 2nd and 3rd most total medals. But, the top spot is that 1904 USA team, even though the number of medals available was next to nothing! They won the most medals a country ever has back when there were so few on offer, which means they won a medal (as in placed gold/silver/bronze) in a truly silly 82.5% of the available events. Hahaha, what? The next best is 45.1% by Great Britain when they hosted the following iteration in 1908. No country has placed in more than a third of the medals since the first World War, making this a truly unbreakable feat. The total medals won isn’t unbreakable, at the rate we’re going there will be even more on offer each version so the USA have a chance to break their own record for totals, but that percentage mark is obscene. The USA’s dominance of the Olympics is up there against any nation’s dominance at a given sporting code.
Alright then, after all that, we ask ourselves:
Will any of these records fall in Paris 2024? If not, can they ever be broken?
I believe a lot of what we’ve talked about today has the potential to fall in Paris, and if not then pretty soon. We’ve seen some very young athletes do very well as recently as Tokyo, so the youngest ever gold medalist is a record that can, if unlikely, be broken. And oldest record could certainly fall if a long jumper has a particularly good day. I also think the USA could break the total medals record, and you never know with athletics, maybe someone can pip Bolt or Flo-Jo, though that one feels very unlikely. Just go back and look at how far ahead of the rest their times are.
Then, in the unbreakable basket, we have Phelps, and we have the 1904 USA team’s percentage of medals won. There is no chance whatsoever that a country takes home 83% of the medals available at a given Olympics, not this year, and not for a very, very, very long time. It would require a seismic shift in Olympic participation and global geopolitics for it to be remotely conceivable. Slightly more conceivable, though still basically impossible, is Phelps’ 8 golds in a single Games and 23 golds ever, actually and 28 total medals. Those are all staggeringly hard to conceive falling. But hey, he did it, so someone else could too right? That’s the beauty of sport.
I hope you’ve enjoyed this sampling of different Olympic records. Even if you enjoyed it half as much as I enjoyed putting them together, then I know you had a blast. I also hope you’re in a better time zone than I am for making the most of the 2024 Paris Games. I'm anticipating many a bleary eyed morning at work for yours truly throughout the event.
Thank you for reading and go the Aussies!
Images taken without permission, find the sources here