I watched the opening ceremony.
I saw that Iraq's team is just a few persons, very pitiful.
Such a big country annihilated by USA, and became rubbles.
When did the USA annihilate Iran?
China leading in medal table.
China has a
lot of people from which to select its elite athletes, and a well-funded training programme for the selected athletes. So, not terribly surprising.
The top 6 countries at the end of the games, based on gold medal count, were, in order:
USA [13]
China [56]
Japan [5]
Great Britain [3]
Russia (in effect) [6]
Australia [1]
Those numbers in the square brackets are the
relative populations of the listed countries, with Australia's population of 25.8 million people scaled to 1. So, for instance, China has 56 times as many citizens as Australia has.
For a while there, I thought the US was having a hard time at these games, but they squeaked through in the end - maybe not doing quite as well as they would have liked.
Japan didn't have far to travel to get to the games, so had a big team on the ground and host-country enthusiasm. Nevertheless, a very good showing.
Great Britain similarly seems to have had an excellent Olympic outing this time around.
It seems possible that a lot of the Russians won their medals without cheating this time around, which is commendable.
As for Australia, my own country, I think we did pretty well. (Aussie Aussie Aussie Oi Oi Oi!) Mind you, we throw money and resources at our Olympic athletes, just like all the other countries in the list above. There are a lot of countries with smaller populations and budgets, which makes the overall medal count more of a political exercise than anything else. What ought to be more important are the performances of the individual athletes, regardless of what country they call home.