The medal table is an argument pretending to be a fact

Every ranking of nations by medals encodes a choice about what counts, and the per-capita version is the worst of them.

The International Olympic Committee does not publish an official ranking of countries. Everybody else publishes one anyway, and no two publish the same one.

Sort by gold first and a nation with three golds beats a nation with two golds and twenty silvers. Sort by total and a country that specialises in team events climbs past one that does not, because a hockey squad of sixteen delivers one medal while a swimming programme of sixteen can deliver eight. The table is not measuring sporting strength. It is measuring how well a country's investments match the shape of the programme, which is a real thing, but not the thing anyone thinks they are reading.

Then there is the per-capita table, produced every Games by someone from a small country, and it is the least defensible of the lot. Medals are lumpy. A nation of a hundred thousand people that produces one exceptional sailor tops the list, and the list then implies that sailor is evidence of a national system. He is evidence of himself. Below a certain population the ranking is dominated by whether one household happened to raise a great athlete, and dividing by population converts noise into a league table.

If you actually want to compare systems, the sensible denominator is not people. It is money and access: facilities per head, funded coaching hours, the number of disciplines a child in an average town can reach by bus. Those numbers are hard to collect, which is why nobody uses them and everybody uses population.

I will defend one version of the table. Count only the events a country could plausibly have entered. A landlocked nation with no ice is not competing for the same pool of medals as one with mountains and a coast, and a ranking that treats the entire programme as available to everyone is comparing menus, not appetites.

None of this stops me looking. I look first, like everyone. The trick is to notice that the table is a claim, and to ask who assembled it and in what order, before repeating it as though the numbers arrived from nowhere.

Sorted by silver, half the internet's national pride evaporates.