Weighted Winter Olympics Medal Count 2014

In honor of the 2014 Winter Olympic Games currently being held in Sochi, Russia, I decided to create a Microsoft Excel spreadsheet template for the medal count as I did for the 2012 Summer Olympics held in London. There are two primary methods most websites appear to be ranking the 2014 medal count. Sites like Yahoo rank countries by the total number of Olympic medals won. Other sites, like the International Olympic Committee (or IOC) rank countries by their gold medal count. Others rank by factors like per capita or GDP, which was used in a Freakonomics article about predicting the medal count with economics.

Pictured below is a bar chart showing all medals won for the top twenty countries (as of the time of this posting on 2-12-14). The bar chart is created in Excel by highlighting the data then going to Insert>Bar>Stacked Bar chart. Change the colors of the bars by right clicking on them then use the drop down menu to select the data you want to change.

The final 2014 Winter Olympic Medal Count

I've devised my own ranking system to give each Olympic medal a weight where the silver is worth half a gold medal and a bronze is worth only a quarter of the gold. Based on this new scoring system, the Olympic results aren’t as different as I thought they would be yet, but there are still a lot of medals to give out. See the results on Google Docs by clicking the link below:

Weighted Winter Olympic Medal Count spreadsheet

How would you weight each medal against the others? Comment below and share any of your Olympic medal rating systems!