The other day I was causally looking around the internet to keep up with the latest Olympic scores and a strange discrepancy became apparent.
The US news websites such as ESPN, ABC, FOX, CBS and Yahoo sports displayed a different medal table to the rest of the world. Initially I thought it was a mistake but the reason soon became apparent as displaying the real medal table would uncomfortably knock the USA from number one place losing out to China, oh the irony!

In the US version of the medal table the total number of medals are counted putting gold on par with a bronze, this has the effect of putting the USA at number one in the leader board. However the rest of the world counts each medal using a three point system, three points for gold, two points for silver and one for bronze.
One wonders why we should bother for gold in France and instead just try and attain as many bronze medals as possible. We should field as many athletes as possible to scoop up all the bronze for our new scoring system and forget winning.

In the real world i.e. outside the United States, China is currently leading the Olympic but in the candy coated American version they are of course always the winners all of the time!

Henri Tubon
Paris Life Gazette