Chinese Olympic medal count

[winters in buffalo]

A lot of it is due to the fact that as a host, China could have athletes participate in any event they wanted as automatic qualifiers. They even instituted a government program to train athletes in all these sports that had a lot of medals at stake. How sad is it that even with these advantages, and the huge population base to pull from, that they had to forge documents to get underaged gymnasts qualified?

But if they're good enough to medal, shouldn't we assume they probably would have met the minimum requirements to qualify anyway? Interesting theory, though. I wonder, historically, how many host country medalists wouldn't have qualified. Did China have any this year?

[jkrdevil]

A lot of it is due to the fact that as a host, China could have athletes participate in any event they wanted as automatic qualifiers. They even instituted a government program to train athletes in all these sports that had a lot of medals at stake. How sad is it that even with these advantages, and the huge population base to pull from, that they had to forge documents to get underaged gymnasts qualified?

But if they're good enough to medal, shouldn't we assume they probably would have met the minimum requirements to qualify anyway? Interesting theory, though. I wonder, historically, how many host country medalists wouldn't have qualified. Did China have any this year?

I'm sure it would help for the team sports. For instance the US baseball team didn't qualify for the Olympics in '04 because of the qualification rules (they only lost 1 game by 1 run to Mexico if I recall right) but had the US had a team they probably would have medaled (the US has a medal for every year they have participated in Olympic Baseball). In that instance had the '04 games been in the States there would have been a chance that a team get a medal that would not have qualified.

However, in the case with China a large portion of their medals (especially gold medals) come from sports where the winners are decided by judging. In this case it's more of a case of "home field" advantage (along with out and out cheating) because the judges are probably influenced to some degree by the home crowd reaction.

On Yahoo's Olympic blog there was a pretty interesting entry on the medal count if you take out the judging events.

As for Thursday:

With the Judged events: 
TEAM GD SL BZ TL
CHN  46 15 22 83
USA  29 34 32 95

Minus judged Events (diving, equestrian, gymnastics, judo, synchronized swimming, taekwondo, trampoline and wrestling):
TEAM GD SL BZ TL
CHN  23 12 13 48
USA  25 26 25 76

http://sports.yahoo.com/olympics/beijing/b...?urn=oly,102540

As of Thursday half of China's Gold medals were in judged events where the crowd can have a influence on the result.

[rams80]

A lot of it is due to the fact that as a host, China could have athletes participate in any event they wanted as automatic qualifiers. They even instituted a government program to train athletes in all these sports that had a lot of medals at stake. How sad is it that even with these advantages, and the huge population base to pull from, that they had to forge documents to get underaged gymnasts qualified?

But if they're good enough to medal, shouldn't we assume they probably would have met the minimum requirements to qualify anyway? Interesting theory, though. I wonder, historically, how many host country medalists wouldn't have qualified. Did China have any this year?

Most of their women's girls' gymnastics squad immediately comes to mind...for non-athletic reasons.

That said...China has placed a very large emphasis on working to win events in fields that are "medal rich" yet relatively "talent poor". Mainly because, by golly that there gold medal in that random event is just as shiny as the basketball gold medal. Not a whole lot the US can do on that front, because we don't emphasize that.

Although for the "population = medals" crew, India begs to differ.

[ivan26278]

Nothing fishy host country always does better then normal and the Chinese spent 8 years building for this.

Everything is freaking 8.

as far as i know it's said in chinese culture that number 8 is for fortune