2024 Olympic Medal Table Predictions
The 2024 Summer Olympics are starting this Friday in Paris. While the Games officially start on Friday, July 26th, soccer, rugby and basketball matches actually start before then, as they need more time complete their competitions. We have a lot of events to look forward to.
But how will the Medal Table look at the end? Nielsen predicts that the US will handily win the overall medal table, with 123 medals, to closest competitor China’s 87 total medals. But it predicts an extremely narrow US gold medal table win, 37 for the US, to 36 for China.
And remember, number of gold medals, and then if tied, number of silver medals, is how it is widely agreed that the medal table is calculated. For what it’s worth, I agree with this method. Whoever wins the most events wins the Olympics. Nielsen has Britain winning more overall medals than hosts France, 62-56, but France winning over double the gold medals of Britain, 29-14.
And as a sidetone, per capita medals are irrelevant. Nations are restricted in the amount of athletes they can send to the Olympics. And it matters, because for US athletes, on a bad day, they could narrowly miss the cut to qualify for the US Olympic team, while on a good, day, they could challenge for medals.
If qualifying was simply based on scores and merit, regardless of nationality, there would be exponentially more American athletes competing. This is evidenced by the fact that nations with less than 10% of the US population regularly have 60-70% as many athletes as the US.
If the 50 states of the US were all separately competing in the Olympics, the amount of athletes they’d take, and amount of medals they’d win, would dwarf how many the US can as a singular country. And of course, with larger nations, it is impossible to keep up per capita. If New Zealand wins one gold medal, China couldn’t beat them in per capita gold medals even if they won every single event in the Olympics.
But back to predicting who would win the medal table. Unless you closely follow every random sporting event on the planet, it’s very difficult to know who will win in every sport. But a general guideline is this; the US should lead unless something strange happens.
China often comes second, on account of their success in individual sports. If Japan, Britain, Germany, France, and Australia usually are in the top 10. The same with Russia, when they don’t take drugs or invade sovereign nations, and can compete. The host always does much better than usual.
France is hosting the games this time. This should mean that France, a perennial top 10 nation and often top 7 nation, should definitely finish in the top 5. In fact, if France doesn’t finish 3rd, or at least 4th, it would be a failure for them. The Netherlands, South Korea, and Italy often surprise and finish high in the medal table.
The United States is the greatest sporting nation in the world. They have won the Gold Medal Table each of the last 3 Summer Olympics and 6 of the last 7 Summer Olympics. They have won the Overall Medal Table each of the last 7 times. Expect continued American sporting supremacy. Although, in 2021, the US barely edged out China in the gold medal table, 39 golds to 38, after coming from 3 golds behind on the last day of the games. The US is the favorite, but nothing is guaranteed.
If I were to predict the Gold Medal table, I would have the US winning it. I would have China finishing second and France finishing third. After that, it gets dicey. Nielsen actually has the Netherlands finishing fourth in the Gold Medal table, with 17. They have Britain, Australia, Japan and Italy narrowly following. Maybe Nielsen knows something I don’t. But I would have Britain and Australia rounding out the top 5 in gold medals.
But predictions are based on specific athletes or teams winning where they are favored. There are always upsets. And it only takes a couple unforeseen results to totally change the medal table. Want to predict the Olympic medal table? Betting on the US to finish on top is about the only reliable pick you can make.