Nowhere on the IOC's website could I find a mention of a "points system." I believe that this value comes from competitions such as Track and Field events, as it is the norm to associate a point value to determine overall winning team of the event. 1st place = 5 points, 2nd place = 3 points, 3rd place = 2 points Give all the athletes their due. Each country has their strengths and weaknesses. Of course countries like the USA and China who field huge teams will come away with lots of medals. As much as I root for the USA to win, I'm always happy to see an athlete from a small country win a gold. I think that they haven't lost track of what it means. I tend to see more pride than dollar signs in their eyes when they win.

This must be a made-up system that some people like to use, but I've never seen the IOC or any other official Olympic body give 'points' values to medals this way. As far as I know the IOC and other bodies count the number of medals won and break them down into gold, silver, bronze, with no 'points' assigned to them.

According to a friend of mine in Greece who follows every olympic games very closely told me that overall ranking is calcaluted by GOLD=3pts, SILVER=2pts and BRONZE=1pt. This would give the total overall ranking since GOLD has always been weighted more, add them up. CHEERZZZZZZZZZZZZ SpaceACE

The list goes by Gold, but at the last column shows the overall ranking. (i.e. France is #11 on the list, but their "overall" rank is 5) The chart shows both. The Chinese committee prob just used this format because they had the better chance of getting more Gold than overall medals, but it's a good chart. It still has US ranked #1 with 62 as opposed to China #2 with only 52 total. (Their Women are killing everyone in the Gold Medal Department)

"I am only saying that for overall ranking position, gold medals are counted, " I know that page on the Web site says Overall Medal Standings and groups the countries by gold. But there are a lot of things on that Web site that don't translate well from Chinese to English, and that is one of them. The word overall means "including everything, comprehensive," and a page that ranks something by considering only one of three categories is not an 'overall' count. If you look all the way to the right of the chart it says "Rank by total." That's the order in which the page calling itself an overall ranking *should* be listing the countries. France has 22 medals, which puts it in fourth place for total (dare I say overall?) medals. Yet this chart shows them ranked 11th, because only 3 of their medals are gold. That's not an "overall" ranking.