Olympic Gold Rush

Posted March 16, 2010. Tagged sports.

One of the benefits on living in the Seattle area is our proximity to Vancouver, BC. While I don’t get to visit the city as often as I’d like, we were fortunate enough to make a trip during the 2010 Winter Olympics. We even got to attend the men’s bronze medal curling match. I have some photos from the trip posted on Flickr.

That aside, I did have a thought about the total Olympic medal counts that is moderately interesting.

The Big Push

There was a lot of controversy surrounding Canada’s “Own the Podium” program, aimed to make Canada the top medal winner at their games. It was widely considered a failure after the first week of competition, with the country’s athletes picking up a mere nine medals.

The final week, however, they gained 17 medals. I started thinking about this huge breakthrough on the last Saturday, after the bronze medal curling match. We were sitting eating lunch at Steamworks Brewing Company in downtown Vancouver. In that short period of time, we got to watch the locals celebrating as Canadian athletes won two more gold medals (in parallel giant slalom and team pursuit).

I put together a little chart showing Canada’s gold medal progress over the course of the 2010 games as compared to the two other top medal earners. Not sure how insightful it is, but I found it interesting to map out the huge push made during the last few days.