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One simple design fix for the Olympic medal tally

33 points by djrobstep 5y ago

deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
mrgordon 5y ago
It’s an interesting point and I somewhat agree but I think the example takes it too far. The most important information is not the sort column but rather the country name. If I want to see who is leading, I don’t want to scan to the final column on the page to see the country names. In fact, if I just want to see which country is leading (and I don’t strongly care about the sort order chosen) then I might only look at the country names and ignore the detailed counts entirely. Whereas if I only see the total medal count or gold medal count column, then I basically have no information since I still need to scan to the last column to find the country names they are associated with.
akersten 5y ago
So the proposed solution here is "use two tables." The rearrangement of the column order is somewhat arbitrary and unconventional. Seems we haven't solved the real problem. I think to answer the question of "how should the scores be ordered," we simply need to ask "how do you win the Olympics?" Is it the most golds? Most total medals? Weighted sum of all medals? Order it that way, it's the only way it makes sense for a leaderboard to be ordered. If one does not "win the Olympics," then there's really no meaning to tease out of any potential leaderboard ordering, so order it however you'd like.
- Overton-Window 5y ago
  The Financial Times’ alternative medal table ranks countries not by their total medal haul but by the difference to the tally they are expected to achieve, according to an economic model that takes into account their economic, social and political characteristics: 1. Russian Olympic Committee 2. Australia 3. China 4. Italy 5. Netherlands 6. Taiwan 7. Germany 8. Cuba 9. Austria 10. New Zealand https://ig.ft.com/tokyo-olympics-alternative-medal-table/ https://ig.ft.com/tokyo-olympics-alternative-medal-table/
  - foota 5y ago
    That's a little silly, since in reality athletic skill is something acquired over time, but doesn't really require much economic input, relative to the overall economy.
    - Overton-Window 5y ago
      > To predict the baseline total number of medals each country might be expected to win in any given summer Olympics, we updated a linear regression model produced by Julia Bredtmann, Carsten J Crede and Sebastian Otten ahead of the Rio Olympics. > Mimicking the original work by Bredtmann, Crede and Otten, we built the same model and fitted it on data for each Summer Olympic year between 1992 and 2008, and then used it to predict the medals table at London 2012. The full model outperforms a naive model that uses only the number of medals a country won and the year of the Games. > We then fitted the same model on data up to and including the 2016 Rio Games, and used this to predict medal counts for Tokyo 2020 (using the latest available data for each input, i.e forecasts for GDP per capita and population in 2021). Model: https://rss.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/j.1740-9713.2016.00915.x https://rss.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/j.1740-...
    - Jorge1o1 5y ago
      So they don’t have any tables describing their regression coefficients, but one of the params they use is lag-1 medals. For example, predicting 2020 medals using 2016 medals. It wouldn’t surprise me if the vast majority of the model’s predictive power came from that, as opposed to GDP per capita, whether the country is Muslim (yes this is actually a predictor too!)
      - nayaketo 5y ago
        How do they determine what factor is a predictor and what isn't?
  - mbg721 5y ago
    I'm a little surprised they don't get wild outliers, a small country having one athlete who gets four medals or something.
Guest42 5y ago
I would choose weights for gold, silver, and bronze and then sort accordingly, this would be confusing which would make the consumer of information pay attention to more of the details.
jessaustin 5y ago
If tables flop the columns around every time a different column is chosen for ordering, many table readers will be very confused.
- mrgordon 5y ago
  Yes most readers know to look for a triangle icon or something similar to indicate which column is currently the sort column if there are multiple options. Changing all the column orderings does feel heavy handed. It’s like if spreadsheets always had to sort by column A, then column B, etc.
- djrobstep 5y ago
  This post is really about display of static tables, not interactive ones. But in the interactive scenario, you could imagine dragging a column heading left or right to change the sort order - I think it could be quite intuitive.
  - mrgordon 5y ago
    Don’t you think the most important column may not be the one you sort by? Most data will have an ID or label (country name in this case) that differentiates the row and gives it meaning. Putting this column last obscures the meaning of the rows.
    - djrobstep 5y ago
      I think the most important thing to convey straight off is the overall structure or order, and the importance of an individual column is secondary to that. I don't think the most important column necessarily has to be on the left - in fact these tables already often have the rank to the left of the country name. There are many other ways to convey column importance, such as bolding the values.
      - mrgordon 5y ago
        The rank being on the left is like a row index. It helps you count without needing to count from the beginning of the column. For this reason, many data-oriented languages like R don’t even consider the row index to be part of the data. If anything the ranking reinforces the idea that a given country is in a given position which is the overall structure and intent of the data (in my view). I’m not likely to look at the table to extract the fact that “7 gold medals is 17th place.” I’m going to see that “country X is 17th place.”
jszymborski 5y ago
I choose the chaotic option of sorting by the score: 3 * gold + 2 * silver + bronze Sorting by gold feels as incorrect to me as sorting by total medals. Sure, a bronze isn't as good as a gold, but sorting by gold is silver/bronze erasure.
- mcphage 5y ago
  What are the results if you do that?
  - mrgordon 5y ago
    Surely the US pulls ahead as currently they have a large lead in total medals and are not too far behind in gold
  - jszymborski 5y ago
    I'll post a spreadsheet in a moment, but here's the top 5: - USA: 167 - CHN: 164 - ROC: 109 - GBR: 96 - JPN: 95 Which I think makes the ranking the same as total medals for the top 5. EDIT: Spreadsheet is here https://cryptpad.fr/sheet/#/2/sheet/view/yFp7KdPHA2hC1cBOL0AKAq-9W+jno5+ttkhswrt4qV4/ https://cryptpad.fr/sheet/#/2/sheet/view/yFp7KdPHA2hC1cBOL0A...
    - mrgordon 5y ago
      FYI you’re pulling out of date data it looks like https://www.bloomberg.com/graphics/tokyo-2020-summer-olympics-medal-count/ https://www.bloomberg.com/graphics/tokyo-2020-summer-olympic... The US got a lot of recent medals which increases the lead
- nayaketo 5y ago
  It should be ranked by per capita population. Tiny countries (like Japan or UK) winning more than half gold of US is way more impressive to me.
  - jszymborski 5y ago
tedunangst 5y ago
I took one look at the second table and was surprised to see Australia hasn't won any gold medals.
- djrobstep 5y ago
  Author here, agree that it would be a bit clearer if the multi-row values were vertically centered or otherwise visually highlighted. Unfortunately I didn't find the time to implement this for this post.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
silveira 5y ago
Yahoo has the worst graph of all https://sports.yahoo.com/olympics/tokyo-2021/ https://sports.yahoo.com/olympics/tokyo-2021/
- thathndude 5y ago
  I kind of like Yahoo’s more than any of the examples. Having the lines be color coded quickly provides the information. Idk, I might be broken.
KingOfCoders 5y ago
Obviously missing total/number of residents.
moltenguardian 5y ago
A different way of thinking about it would be considering each Olympic trial as a voter and use gold/silver/bronze as 1st/2nd/3rd in a ranked-choice vote. Each "contest" effectively votes on a country.
- lern_too_spel 5y ago
  This is what most tables already do. They sort by 1st and tie break by each successive place.
banana_giraffe 5y ago
It feels wrong to me to view it this way. The first column of a table should be the item, and the remaining columns should be the details of the item. This implies 77 total medals is the item, and the detail of that is the US. It just parses wrong in my head. I almost wonder if the proper order isn't some sort of % of medals won vs participants for each country, so countries that have few athletes in the competition but all medal in most of the events they're in show highly. Then again, I'm willing to admit I have no clue what people that look at these charts are after.
- djrobstep 5y ago
  It's already commonplace to put other columns left of the "item" or "id" column. Every golf leaderboard does this, for instance.
  - mrgordon 5y ago
    The ones I checked have rank and player name first followed by the detailed scores https://www.espn.com/golf/leaderboard https://www.espn.com/golf/leaderboard
    - djrobstep 5y ago
      Yes, the rank is always displayed leftmost - whereas OP was saying that the leftmost column should be the label (in the case of golf, the player name)
      - mrgordon 5y ago
        The rank goes with the label. Who got first? Tiger Woods got first. It isn't helpful to know that someone shot a 68 and got first without knowing who it is.
        djrobstep 5y ago
        > The rank goes with the label. I don't understand what you mean. Why does the rank go with the label, but the score doesn't? > It isn't helpful to know that someone shot a 68 and got first without knowing who it is. But you do know - the name is right there next to the score.
arrosenberg 5y ago
Sort by total and use color to highlight the leader in each specific medal count (i.e. China's gold count should be given a gold color treatment, US for silver/bronze).
cco 5y ago
> Once again, the table flows naturally from left to right. The most critical column is leftmost(number of gold medals). Hm, I don't think so. The most critical bit of information is the country, the Olympics are a contest of countries. To wit, I'm sure many publications will order the table so that it best pleases their audience, i.e. places their country the highest. When I, and I would bet most, people are looking at these lists they're looking for the top three countries, or their own, the exact reason for each country's place is far less material than the ranking system that the table maker chose.
- djrobstep 5y ago
  I've no doubt many people look at a medal table, look for their own country's name, confirm it is near the top, and close the tab without examining it further. But I'm not sure that is the use case we should be optimizing for!
  - makeitdouble 5y ago
    To be fair, the Olympics’ explicit primary goal is for “country pride” to have a scene. Removing that part, none of it makes much sense (if you only care about individual athletes or disciplines, you’ll be fine with annual world events)
- KingOfCoders 5y ago
  List from the top divided by number of residents: Looks like New Zealand is on top, then Australia, Netherlands and Great Britain (there might be stronger countries down the list, I just calculated the first scores). China is last, the US second to last and then Germany. United States 0.508836076 People's Republic of China 0.117310443 Russian Olympic Committee 0.754847645 Great Britain 1.48721921 Japan 0.752177356 Australia 2.996845426 Germany 0.734939759 Italy 0.928689884 France 0.745600954 Netherlands 2.604166667 New Zealand 7.551020408 I wonder what it says about countries/societies sport system that are near to each other, like France, Germany, Japan and Russia at 0.75
  - 5y ago
coding123 5y ago
There wasn't a problem.
Hammershaft 5y ago
If you award bronze 1 point, silver 2 points, and gold 3 points, then the US has 157 and China has 156.
stingrae 5y ago
slightly off topic: does any other country (besides the US and China) actually care about the total number of medals earned per country?
- lern_too_spel 5y ago
  Russia.
PieUser 5y ago
why not just have 3 tables? one for gold, one for silver, one for bronze.
sonograph 5y ago
I would like to se it weighted by the number of athletes sent.
getlawgdon 5y ago
The simple fix us to simply use points: 1 bronze, 2 silver, 4 gold.

33 points by djrobstep 5y ago

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

It’s an interesting point and I somewhat agree but I think the example takes it too far. The most important information is not the sort column but rather the country name. If I want to see who is leading, I don’t want to scan to the final column on the page to see the country names. In fact, if I just want to see which country is leading (and I don’t strongly care about the sort order chosen) then I might only look at the country names and ignore the detailed counts entirely. Whereas if I only see the total medal count or gold medal count column, then I basically have no information since I still need to scan to the last column to find the country names they are associated with.

akersten 5y ago

So the proposed solution here is "use two tables." The rearrangement of the column order is somewhat arbitrary and unconventional. Seems we haven't solved the real problem. I think to answer the question of "how should the scores be ordered," we simply need to ask "how do you win the Olympics?" Is it the most golds? Most total medals? Weighted sum of all medals? Order it that way, it's the only way it makes sense for a leaderboard to be ordered. If one does not "win the Olympics," then there's really no meaning to tease out of any potential leaderboard ordering, so order it however you'd like.

Overton-Window 5y ago
The Financial Times’ alternative medal table ranks countries not by their total medal haul but by the difference to the tally they are expected to achieve, according to an economic model that takes into account their economic, social and political characteristics: 1. Russian Olympic Committee 2. Australia 3. China 4. Italy 5. Netherlands 6. Taiwan 7. Germany 8. Cuba 9. Austria 10. New Zealand https://ig.ft.com/tokyo-olympics-alternative-medal-table/ https://ig.ft.com/tokyo-olympics-alternative-medal-table/
- foota 5y ago
  That's a little silly, since in reality athletic skill is something acquired over time, but doesn't really require much economic input, relative to the overall economy.
  - Overton-Window 5y ago
    > To predict the baseline total number of medals each country might be expected to win in any given summer Olympics, we updated a linear regression model produced by Julia Bredtmann, Carsten J Crede and Sebastian Otten ahead of the Rio Olympics. > Mimicking the original work by Bredtmann, Crede and Otten, we built the same model and fitted it on data for each Summer Olympic year between 1992 and 2008, and then used it to predict the medals table at London 2012. The full model outperforms a naive model that uses only the number of medals a country won and the year of the Games. > We then fitted the same model on data up to and including the 2016 Rio Games, and used this to predict medal counts for Tokyo 2020 (using the latest available data for each input, i.e forecasts for GDP per capita and population in 2021). Model: https://rss.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/j.1740-9713.2016.00915.x https://rss.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/j.1740-...
  - Jorge1o1 5y ago
    So they don’t have any tables describing their regression coefficients, but one of the params they use is lag-1 medals. For example, predicting 2020 medals using 2016 medals. It wouldn’t surprise me if the vast majority of the model’s predictive power came from that, as opposed to GDP per capita, whether the country is Muslim (yes this is actually a predictor too!)
    - nayaketo 5y ago
      How do they determine what factor is a predictor and what isn't?
- mbg721 5y ago
  I'm a little surprised they don't get wild outliers, a small country having one athlete who gets four medals or something.

Guest42 5y ago

I would choose weights for gold, silver, and bronze and then sort accordingly, this would be confusing which would make the consumer of information pay attention to more of the details.

jessaustin 5y ago

If tables flop the columns around every time a different column is chosen for ordering, many table readers will be very confused.

mrgordon 5y ago
Yes most readers know to look for a triangle icon or something similar to indicate which column is currently the sort column if there are multiple options. Changing all the column orderings does feel heavy handed. It’s like if spreadsheets always had to sort by column A, then column B, etc.
djrobstep 5y ago
This post is really about display of static tables, not interactive ones. But in the interactive scenario, you could imagine dragging a column heading left or right to change the sort order - I think it could be quite intuitive.
- mrgordon 5y ago
  Don’t you think the most important column may not be the one you sort by? Most data will have an ID or label (country name in this case) that differentiates the row and gives it meaning. Putting this column last obscures the meaning of the rows.
  - djrobstep 5y ago
    I think the most important thing to convey straight off is the overall structure or order, and the importance of an individual column is secondary to that. I don't think the most important column necessarily has to be on the left - in fact these tables already often have the rank to the left of the country name. There are many other ways to convey column importance, such as bolding the values.
    - mrgordon 5y ago
      The rank being on the left is like a row index. It helps you count without needing to count from the beginning of the column. For this reason, many data-oriented languages like R don’t even consider the row index to be part of the data. If anything the ranking reinforces the idea that a given country is in a given position which is the overall structure and intent of the data (in my view). I’m not likely to look at the table to extract the fact that “7 gold medals is 17th place.” I’m going to see that “country X is 17th place.”

jszymborski 5y ago

I choose the chaotic option of sorting by the score: 3 * gold + 2 * silver + bronze Sorting by gold feels as incorrect to me as sorting by total medals. Sure, a bronze isn't as good as a gold, but sorting by gold is silver/bronze erasure.

mcphage 5y ago
What are the results if you do that?
- mrgordon 5y ago
  Surely the US pulls ahead as currently they have a large lead in total medals and are not too far behind in gold
- jszymborski 5y ago
  I'll post a spreadsheet in a moment, but here's the top 5: - USA: 167 - CHN: 164 - ROC: 109 - GBR: 96 - JPN: 95 Which I think makes the ranking the same as total medals for the top 5. EDIT: Spreadsheet is here https://cryptpad.fr/sheet/#/2/sheet/view/yFp7KdPHA2hC1cBOL0AKAq-9W+jno5+ttkhswrt4qV4/ https://cryptpad.fr/sheet/#/2/sheet/view/yFp7KdPHA2hC1cBOL0A...
  - mrgordon 5y ago
    FYI you’re pulling out of date data it looks like https://www.bloomberg.com/graphics/tokyo-2020-summer-olympics-medal-count/ https://www.bloomberg.com/graphics/tokyo-2020-summer-olympic... The US got a lot of recent medals which increases the lead
nayaketo 5y ago
It should be ranked by per capita population. Tiny countries (like Japan or UK) winning more than half gold of US is way more impressive to me.
- jszymborski 5y ago

tedunangst 5y ago

I took one look at the second table and was surprised to see Australia hasn't won any gold medals.

djrobstep 5y ago
Author here, agree that it would be a bit clearer if the multi-row values were vertically centered or otherwise visually highlighted. Unfortunately I didn't find the time to implement this for this post.

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

silveira 5y ago

Yahoo has the worst graph of all https://sports.yahoo.com/olympics/tokyo-2021/ https://sports.yahoo.com/olympics/tokyo-2021/

thathndude 5y ago
I kind of like Yahoo’s more than any of the examples. Having the lines be color coded quickly provides the information. Idk, I might be broken.

KingOfCoders 5y ago

Obviously missing total/number of residents.

moltenguardian 5y ago

A different way of thinking about it would be considering each Olympic trial as a voter and use gold/silver/bronze as 1st/2nd/3rd in a ranked-choice vote. Each "contest" effectively votes on a country.

lern_too_spel 5y ago
This is what most tables already do. They sort by 1st and tie break by each successive place.

banana_giraffe 5y ago

It feels wrong to me to view it this way. The first column of a table should be the item, and the remaining columns should be the details of the item. This implies 77 total medals is the item, and the detail of that is the US. It just parses wrong in my head. I almost wonder if the proper order isn't some sort of % of medals won vs participants for each country, so countries that have few athletes in the competition but all medal in most of the events they're in show highly. Then again, I'm willing to admit I have no clue what people that look at these charts are after.

djrobstep 5y ago
It's already commonplace to put other columns left of the "item" or "id" column. Every golf leaderboard does this, for instance.
- mrgordon 5y ago
  The ones I checked have rank and player name first followed by the detailed scores https://www.espn.com/golf/leaderboard https://www.espn.com/golf/leaderboard
  - djrobstep 5y ago
    Yes, the rank is always displayed leftmost - whereas OP was saying that the leftmost column should be the label (in the case of golf, the player name)
    - mrgordon 5y ago
      The rank goes with the label. Who got first? Tiger Woods got first. It isn't helpful to know that someone shot a 68 and got first without knowing who it is.
      - djrobstep 5y ago
        > The rank goes with the label. I don't understand what you mean. Why does the rank go with the label, but the score doesn't? > It isn't helpful to know that someone shot a 68 and got first without knowing who it is. But you do know - the name is right there next to the score.

arrosenberg 5y ago

Sort by total and use color to highlight the leader in each specific medal count (i.e. China's gold count should be given a gold color treatment, US for silver/bronze).

cco 5y ago

> Once again, the table flows naturally from left to right. The most critical column is leftmost(number of gold medals). Hm, I don't think so. The most critical bit of information is the country, the Olympics are a contest of countries. To wit, I'm sure many publications will order the table so that it best pleases their audience, i.e. places their country the highest. When I, and I would bet most, people are looking at these lists they're looking for the top three countries, or their own, the exact reason for each country's place is far less material than the ranking system that the table maker chose.

djrobstep 5y ago
I've no doubt many people look at a medal table, look for their own country's name, confirm it is near the top, and close the tab without examining it further. But I'm not sure that is the use case we should be optimizing for!
- makeitdouble 5y ago
  To be fair, the Olympics’ explicit primary goal is for “country pride” to have a scene. Removing that part, none of it makes much sense (if you only care about individual athletes or disciplines, you’ll be fine with annual world events)
KingOfCoders 5y ago
List from the top divided by number of residents: Looks like New Zealand is on top, then Australia, Netherlands and Great Britain (there might be stronger countries down the list, I just calculated the first scores). China is last, the US second to last and then Germany. United States 0.508836076 People's Republic of China 0.117310443 Russian Olympic Committee 0.754847645 Great Britain 1.48721921 Japan 0.752177356 Australia 2.996845426 Germany 0.734939759 Italy 0.928689884 France 0.745600954 Netherlands 2.604166667 New Zealand 7.551020408 I wonder what it says about countries/societies sport system that are near to each other, like France, Germany, Japan and Russia at 0.75
- 5y ago

coding123 5y ago

There wasn't a problem.

Hammershaft 5y ago

If you award bronze 1 point, silver 2 points, and gold 3 points, then the US has 157 and China has 156.

stingrae 5y ago

slightly off topic: does any other country (besides the US and China) actually care about the total number of medals earned per country?

lern_too_spel 5y ago
Russia.

PieUser 5y ago

why not just have 3 tables? one for gold, one for silver, one for bronze.

sonograph 5y ago

I would like to se it weighted by the number of athletes sent.

getlawgdon 5y ago

The simple fix us to simply use points: 1 bronze, 2 silver, 4 gold.