Olympic Alphabet : M is for ...

MEDAL COUNT

Team LGBT has been remarkably successful at the Olympic Games (I’ll deal with the Paralympics in a separate article in June). Considering my list of lgbt athletes (as of today's date) now numbers 224 that is a small number compared to the 128,420 Olympians (excluding the Youth Olympics) listed by the International Olympic Committee.

The full list of lgbt medallists, which will be made available on the opening day of Rio 2016, is long, much too long to reproduce in full today, but to give you an idea of how successful they are, out of the 224 listed Olympians 113 have won at least one medal. That’s over half of them! And of those 113 medallists 44 have won more than one.

Between them the 44 multi-medallists have 131 medals in total. Almost a third of these were won by 15 Winter Olympians. Again, there isn’t room to list them all today, so here are the Top Ten Medal Winners.

	Name	Gold	Silver	Bronze	Total
1	Ian Thorpe	5	3	1	9
2	Ireen Wüst	4	3	1	8
3	Karin Büttner-Janz	2	3	2	7
4	Anja Pärson	1	1	4	6
5=	Greg Louganis	4	1	0	5
5=	Jayna Hefford	4	1	0	5
7	Marnie McBean	3	1	0	4
8=	Daniel Kowalski	1	1	2	4
8=	Blyth Tait	1	1	2	4
10	Robert Dover	0	0	4	4

NOTE: This table counts the total number of medals won by each athlete. Other 10 athletes have won 2 gold medals each. I haven’t placed them higher than Pärson, Kowalski, Tait and Dover because they won fewer medals than those four overall. The top 6 multi-gold-winning lgbt champions all make it into the top 10.

Since the early years of the modern Olympics all top 8 finishers in every event have received Olympic Diplomas. The top 3, of course, also win gold, silver or bronze medals. Only 60, just over a quarter of the 224 lgbt Olympians, have not placed higher than 9^th position. The following table shows how many lgbt Olympians have finished in the top 8 and received Diplomas.

Gold	Silver	Bronze	4th	5th	6th	7th	8th
83	60	61	27	27	37	19	16

What we can see immediately is that most lgbt athletes have achieved the top placings. The figure of 83 Olympic champions in a group of 224 is phenomenal. It would seem natural to expect larger numbers in the lower placings, but you can see that when it comes to top places lgbt athletes are very successful. A similar analysis of non-lgbt-identified Olympians would be a major task considering how many thousands of them there have been, so I don’t want to make any comparisons.

But which nation has won the most medals? Of course, the nation with the most athletes is likely to come top. Generally speaking, that is exactly what we find. Below is a table of the top 10 lgbt medal placings according to nation.

	Nation	Gold	Silver	Bronze	Total
1	USA	29	11	11	51
2	Canada	13	8	6	27
3	Netherlands	10	10	11	27
4	Australia	10	12	4	26
5	Germany (including East & West)	3	8	1	11
6	Norway	4	1	4	9
7	Great Britain	3	0	4	7
8	Denmark	6	0	0	6
9	Sweden	1	3	2	6
10=	Poland	2	1	1	4
10=	Czechoslovakia/Republic	1	2	1	4
10=	New Zealand	1	1	2	4

Now, the top 10 medal placings arranged by sport.

	Sport	Gold	Silver	Bronze	Total
1	swimming	8	6	6	20
2	ice hockey	9	5	4	18
3	track & field	8	7	3	18
4	football	7	0	10	17
5	equestrianism	2	3	11	16
6	hockey	8	1	5	14
7	speed skating	5	6	1	12
8	figure skating	3	4	3	10
9	handball	8	0	1	9
10	diving	5	2	2	9

NOTE: I place ice hockey higher than track and field because more gold medals were won. Likewise with handball and diving.

There is further analysis according to team and individual events, but I’ll leave that for another time. Analysis of medals won by athletes who were openly lgbt compared to those who weren’t is more difficult because of incomplete information of when some athletes came out.

I hope all the number-crunching hasn’t been too much of a statistical overload. I know for a fact that these statistics will change before the end of Rio 2016 as more lgbt Olympians compete and more are identified.

More number-crunching next time, I’m afraid, when I number-crunch the numbers of lgbt competitors at individual games, and I take a trip down memory lane.