Olympics and medal tallies

The other thing I will do when I take control of the Olympics is to ban any publication of medal tallies by nation (regardless of whether won sitting or standing).

It seems to me to be an irrelevant statistic. Yet people seem to see it as important to know if China "medalled" more than USA. Why? Does it prove that communism is better than capitalism? Or that eating a lot of rice is good for sport?

National success at the Olympics seems to relate to:

* the size of the population -- a big population will have more "natural talent" than a small one
* having the sport so popular in your country so that potential champions are likely to be identified while young (e.g. Australians can easily find their talented swimmers and Norwegians their skiiers but not vice versa)
* the amount of money spent on the training of potential champions and the purchase/development of high tech equipment
* having lots of different events in sports that your country is good at (gymnastics with a ribbon/ball/etc, different weight divisions in weight lifting, all the different strokes in swimming) rather than having just one or two events (why not have 50kg men's soccer, 60kg men's soccer, 7-aside soccer, etc)