With the 2024 Summer Olympics drawing to a close, medal trackers are set to disappear from homepages for a few years. By now, you’ve probably seen a list of five or so where each row represents a country, with four columns showing the country’s gold, silver, bronze, and total. It’s a simple overview that shows what most people are looking for.

I do like the wrinkles that add something to the counts though. The premise is that countries can be ranked differently based on criteria other than medal count, which puts a spotlight on smaller countries or maybe just gives you a way to blow the whistle on your own country.

Bloomberg’s table above lets you sort by each medal, as well as by million people and $100 billion in GDP. Grenada, Dominica and Saint Lucia, for example, stand out when you consider their small populations.

Reuters sorts by total gold medals next to stacked bars to show relative distributions:

The Washington Post offers a couple of angles on the same page. There’s a table you can toggle to sort by total or just gold medals, which looks about as you’d expect. I like the comparison to the Tokyo Olympics to see if there was an improvement this year. They call it over- and under-performance, but I guess I’d just say better or worse than last time.

My favorite view is still this Josh Katz classic for NYT’s Upshot, which they’ve updated every Olympics since 2018. Apply the importance of each medal yourself and make your own rankings. I suspect the heatmaps will be lost on a lot of readers, but I’m glad they’re bringing it back.

Keywords: medal, olympics, tracker