Now the Olympics is officially and forever over, the stomach-crunchers give way to the number-crunchers to see who can perform the best statistical analysis of the results. And whatever way you crunch them, America won. Ok, the Russians had overdosed their way out of most of the sports and some (particularly me) reckoned they should have been banned altogether. But this isn’t about drugs. Iss’about medals.

Britain came a fantabulous second. Beating China, who actually won more medals but the tables are ranked on golds. A team with one gold and nothing else would rank above a team with no golds but 472 silver and bronzes. I’m not sayin’ its fair, I’m just sayin’.

But we know all that. History. Now we have the new rankings. The more creative ones, possibly the more significant ones. If they calculate medals (any colour) per capita of national population, New Zealand win. 1 medal for every 250,000 of population, or for every 2,000,000 sheep. Even though the sheep aren’t allowed to compete (they’d fail the drugs testing) I don’t think its fair to leave them out altogether.

Britain, by comparison, won one medal for every 970,000. Which is decent? (who fucking knows, or cares, what any mythical ‘norm’ might be?). Whereas China, who came third in the regular table, won one medal for every 19.5million of population. There’s a lotta Chinamen not pulling their weight out there. Many competing countries don’t have 19.5million of population.

But, of course, in any event there are winners (that’d be us then, smug bastard that I am, doing my bit by watching more tv in the last 3 weeks than in two non-olympic years), and there are losers.

Some nations won nothing. Like the Pacific Island of Nahru, population 10,000. They sent 2 athletes over, itself something of a big achievement. Good luck to them. Bit late I suppose for that.

But how about Chile? Uganda? Zimbabwe? Not a medal between them. Big countries. But nothing like as big as Pakistan, who also scored zero. And what about Saudi Arabia? Massive and massively rich country, they sent over 11 athletes but to no avail. Even though they probably sent them over first class or on a private jet.

A complaint has been lodged by the Saudis to the Olympic Committee for them to instil a fairer cultural mix of sporting events, so as not to discriminate against the Saudis. They want to get rid of the 100m, 200m and all the swimming. And replace them with events in wife-beating, gay-stoning, eating-til-you-vomit, misogyny (5k AND 10k), camel-shagging, terrorist-sponsoring and political repression.

Happy Monday; its over

A xxxx