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The mystique of “gold, silver and bronze” has always been the signature way of ranking sport competitions. We at GSN have introduced our own measure of ranking, the “1-8 places” criterion, which gives a better perspective on results than the medals ranking.

Nothing short of a full ranking of all competitors would be the “perfect” ranking of a sport event. Yet the first 8 places are undeniably much nearer to perfection than medals places, so we continue undaunted.

And we continue to research and compare the relative merits of ours and other rankings.

At the end of 2011 we have analysed the GSN results of eleven multi-event World Championships, and compared them with their respective medal tables.

For each sport we have computed a “variability index” for the top ten countries in the GSN ranking (the second column below): it’s the algebraic sum of the differences between the GSN and the medal ranking, divided by 10. The higher the value of the index, the greater the difference between GSN and medals rankings.

 

What happened to Robin Hood’s lineage??

 

In our opinion two main considerations emerge:

a)      The more events in the tournament, the likelier it is for the rankings to differ significantly. Thus the Aquatics Worlds (69 events) and other high-event championships lead the table in terms of variability index (second column). A variability index of 3,8 in the positive means that any position in the top ten GSN countries is nearly four times higher than in the medals ranking. The table gives a clear indication of how number of events and variability index are correlated. Note that the number of countries with a variation (third column) does not make much of a difference, nor does the participation to the event: for example the Canoe-Kayak Sprint Worlds are higher than the Athletics Worlds in the table despite having 38 countries scoring points vs 67 in Athletics. What counts is the number of events, which are very close to each other.

b)      Overall, the differential between the two rankings is relatively low but our calculations have stopped at the top ten countries. If we compared all the countries in the GSN ranking, we’d inevitably find a much greater difference. Take the example of Brazil in the Aquatics worlds 2011: the country ranks 13^th in the GSN table, and 4^th in the medals table!!. The difference of 9 positions is more than double that of the average of the top ten, and it raises a question as to Brazil’s true achievement. In the Fencing Worlds, the case of the Netherlands is similar, in reverse: 14^th in the GSN ranking and 9^th in the medals table.

Thus a country like Great Britain, a fairly regular guest in most sports’ top ten, shows no significant variation between the two rankings, as the columns to the right of the table show.

The bottom line is that GSN rankings do not differ overmuch from medals table if we look at the top countries in any sport. On the other hand, they do a good job of putting into broader perspective the achievements of countries below the top ten, and especially in multi-event championships with at least 20 events. Cf. in the 2011 Aquatics worlds: Montenegro is 25^th in the GSN ranking but nowhere in the medals table, while Switzerland, 15^th in the medals ranking lies in 27^th place, 2 behind Montenegro, in the GSN table.