Well, so is swimming speed. I may not have the statistical terminology correct, but the difference is that "age" and "swimming speed" are directly measurable co

Well, so is swimming speed. I may not have the statistical terminology correct, but the difference is that "age" and "swimming speed" are directly measurable continuous aspects of reality, while "# of olympic medals is some kind of discretized derivative of others. Imagine that instead of measuring "age" we measured "number of days person was the oldest person in the world". You'd get wildly divergent results for the latter that would be more like the olympic medal count. Or if we determined how wet or dry a climate was not by measuring "annual rainfall" but, like "number of minutes per year in which more rain was falling here than other places".