ASK AND YE SHALL RECEIVE.

Who really wins the Olympics?  "The convention is to count medals won by sports, meaning one figure skater counts the same as twenty hockey players in the gold medal count."  People with more time to work the problem, or perhaps paid to work the problem, such as Reason's Jason Russell, take on the convention.  He asked his wise and worldly readers (thanks, Matt!) for advice and they delivered.

Another popular idea that several of you suggested was splitting up the subjective sports into a new category, including sports where judges are the primary determinants of the winner, such as gymnastics and figure skating. One of you even suggested giving those sports their own separate Olympics.

Hell^YES!

Let's hear it for enough bandwidth for multiple channels to provide Olympic coverage.  Back in the day of the three major networks, everybody got what the program directors thought would draw the best ratings, meaning endless judged contests, whether figure skating in the winter games or gymnastics in the summer games.  Griping about being screwed over by the Soviet judge obligatory.  I have no doubt that those events were on NBC's primary channel.  There was enough by way of curling and biathlon on offer on the secondary channels.

And yes, his readers also took issue with how to determine the ideology country that wins an Olympiad.

Lastly, I was surprised to see two-thirds of you prefer ranking countries by total medals instead of gold medals. I thought more of a "Winning isn't everything; it's the only thing" mentality would prevail among my American readers. Fortunately, the official count doesn't matter (in the sense that the Olympics doesn't name the country with the most medals that year's overall "winner") so we can play around and create our own medal tables based on various factors, as The New York Times' Ben Blatt did. (The Summer Olympics version was even wonkier.)

It being New York's Times, you know that Mr Blatt will break down the medal counts by sex to note that Norse men account for most of Norway's medals.  He continues, though, by paying attention to precisely what I asked for.

The standard way to track medals is to count each event as awarding a single gold, silver and bronze medal. Counting that way doesn’t reward large team efforts like hockey in the official medal count, while other sports allow a single athlete to rack up medals in multiple events.

The cross-country skier Johannes Klaebo of Norway won six gold medals, including two in team events, but 48 hockey players from the United States received gold medals for just two events. If we count the number of athletes who received at least one medal, the U.S., Canada and Switzerland do very well.

Norway would also do better relative to one criterion those Reason readers proposed if their team swept the podium in an event.  Should you wish to be wonky, Mr Blatt offers a number of other stratifications, and there's even a handy interactive feature at the article.

There are plenty of other ways to slice the results, most that will please Norwegians but some that won’t. Are you a purist for the original Winter Olympics? What if medals were adjusted for population?

Spoiler alert: Norway still wins on a per-capita basis and among small countries. Fewer Norwegians than Chicagoans? Who knew?  He offers a "versatility" calculation, aggregating for a country within its events in a sport, but that's not the same thing as honoring sweeping the podium, where that is available.