Vancouver Blogger Sriseth

Doesn't matter who will win the final gold medal of these winter games, both Canada and USA already had fairytale performances that will go into records books. USA has already matched the highest number of total medals ever won in a winter Olympics, while Canada has matched highest number of gold medals ever won by a country. Still many wonder who should get the credit as the victor of these 2010 winter games. Two different methods of determining the winner has added to this confusion. Both USA and Canada seem to prefer Total Medals Count method, while most other countries determine the winner by Gold Medal Count. Although International Olympic Committee (IOC) does not recognize an official winner, they also publish the medal tables sorted according to Gold Medal Count (Read Wikipedia Article for more info).

It's easy to understand why USA prefer to use Overall medals against Gold medals. USA benefited from this method at 2008 Beijing Summer Olympics when China came up top with 51 golds compared to USA's 36. But USA had 10 more total medals than China. Question is why Canada is also adopting Total Medal Count Method? Are we just following our 'big' neighbours? Apparently, Canada initially assumed the best chance of topping the medal table is by overall medals. This is the concept behind Own the Podium campaign. Nobody may have expected Canadian athletes to win record number of gold medals. After-all we had to first break the home gold jinx. After an unexpected late gold rush by Canadian athletes, now it's too late to change our definition of winner. Our own Vancouver 2010 website will forever show USA has won the Olympics and Canada came in third, while rest of the World will show that Canada has comprehensively won their home Olympics with a records gold medal tally. How ironic.

"Ironically, Canada have fallen short of their own definition of success which was to win more medals - of any colour - than any other team. The vast majority of countries judge Olympic success on the basis of the number of golds won" - BBC Sports