On Tuesday, one country had a particularly good day at the Olympics.
The female gymnasts won the team event in a landslide. The women’s rugby team took an unexpected bronze medal and went viral. The swimmers won four out of a possible five medals in two individual races and a relay.
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Several of the country’s rowers came through their heats and remained in contention for a medal. Several of the team’s tennis players won their matches, and the BMX freestylers showed their skills in the qualifiers. The men’s volleyball team remained undefeated, the men’s water polo team achieved a comeback victory, and the men’s football team stormed into the knockout rounds. The country is not known for table tennis, but the players improved their record in Paris to 5-1.
For most countries, that’s a great day.
But at the Olympics, the US is not as strong as most other countries.
American fans aren’t used to looking up to South Korea, France, Australia, China and Japan in the medal table. While 3×3 basketball is a relatively new Olympic sport, they aren’t used to seeing the women’s and men’s teams lose to Germany and Serbia, respectively, on the same day. And they’re a little surprised to see a men’s surfing competition in which no American man makes it past the quarterfinals.
On the one hand, the medal count that showed the U.S. in sixth place as of noon Paris time on Wednesday (the large number of events means the positions may have changed slightly by the time you read this) is the version that sorts the table by gold medals. But, as is customary in the U.S., the table is sorted by total In terms of medals, the Americans led the way by a wide margin, with 26 medals to France’s 18 and China’s 14 as events began on Wednesday.
Of the 206 Olympic teams in the Games, perhaps 200 will celebrate a medal as a huge achievement. It’s especially in the United States where the reaction to a silver or bronze medal is often, “Oh, that’s too bad.” And the debate over whether the medal table should be sorted by gold medals or total Medals are a hot topic in much of the world on social media, although most US residents and fans simply shrug their shoulders.
(To be completely pedantic, the best way to measure overall strength is on a sliding scale with five points for gold, three for silver, and one for bronze. Through Day 4, the U.S. led with 64 points, compared to France’s 56, China’s 50, Japan’s 45, Australia’s 43, and Great Britain’s 38. Or one could rank countries based on the top eight in each event—in fact, veteran sportswriter Rich Perelman now does that.)
The U.S. results are not a surprise overall. Several Olympic predictions had the Americans far ahead in total medals, but in a neck-and-neck race for gold medals, with China likely to lead early on thanks to diving and shooting. Track and field, where Team USA has typically dominated, begins about halfway through the Games.
Yes, it seems unlikely that the U.S. swimmers will repeat their Tokyo feat, when they claimed 11 gold medals. But they are only a few gold medals behind most reasonable predictions. No one should be surprised to see Summer McIntosh, Léon Marchand and Ariarne Titmus win gold medals that the U.S. claimed in previous years.
So far, no American athlete has missed out on a gold medal in events they were clearly favored to win. Ryan Murphy was An of the favorites in the 100m backstroke, which he won eight years ago in Rio, but his bronze medal was no surprise. Carson Foster had a good credentials in the men’s 400m individual medley, but no one could beat Marchand in that final. Even the mighty Katie Ledecky was not the favorite in the women’s 400m freestyle.
Team USA’s Gold Medals to have won, except for the women’s team gymnastics, were mild to moderate surprises. The U.S. men’s 4x100m freestyle relay improved from bronze at last year’s world championships to gold this year. Last year, Torri Huske and Gretchen Walsh were third and eighth in the women’s 100m butterfly; this year, they took gold and silver. Lee Kiefer was the reigning champion in women’s foil fencing, but only two fencers in Olympic history had won back-to-back gold medals in the event. Still, she delivered.
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Of the 26 medals the U.S. has won through Tuesday, many are perhaps not shocking but far from certain. Kassidy Cook and Sarah Bacon in synchronized diving. Haley Batten in mountain biking. The men’s gymnastics team. The women’s rugby sevens team. Lauren Scruggs, the runner-up to Kiefer in fencing.
Other athletes lived up to the high expectations. Jagger Eaton and Nyjah Huston in the men’s street skateboarding. Chloé Dygert in the crash-packed women’s cycling time trial. In swimming, the U.S. team, despite winning “only” two gold medals, has 15 medals — more than all the Olympic contingents of all countries through day four, except the host, France.
None of this is to say that American fans should rejoice in the overachievement on all fronts. Whatever boxing judges are looking for, the American men are not delivering. American shooters are having a bad year. Coco Gauff and Jessica Pegula retired far too early from the women’s singles, though they are on one of five American doubles teams that have a combined 6-0 record so far. The vaunted, experienced 3×3 basketball teams seemed bewildered in their debuts on Tuesday. Everyone in the U.S. is suddenly a surfing expert, dissecting why John John Florence and Griffin Colapinto are not in the game.
But we still don’t have enough data to suggest that the U.S. will fall far short of expectations in Paris—if there is widespread American failure in track and field and in team sports like basketball, then perhaps we should reevaluate. And most countries would be celebrating both the continued achievements of their veterans (Ledecky, Murphy, Eaton) and a slew of new emerging Olympic stars—Batten, Scruggs, Cook and Bacon, Stephen Nedoroscik, Fred Richard, Alex Sedrick, Taryn Kloth and Kristen Nuss. In most countries, the rest of the world wouldn’t be eagerly awaiting the moment they “failed” by “only” taking a silver or bronze medal.
But at the Olympics, the US is not the most populous country.
