It now looks quite certain that China is going to top the TOTAL medal table. Yes, I am aware there is such thing as "total medal table" that most US media has been using but they are nonsense. If you are going to assign equal weight to all medals and discourage over-emphasis on gold, why not the 3rd runner up, or the 10th runner up for that matter? (or simply the number of participants).
The measure that makes more sense though, is what NYT proposed in one of its article. The table ranks countries by counting points, with Gold - 4 points, silver 2, and bronze 1. (I would propose 0.5 for the 3rd runner-up and so on).
(update) Final ranking:
1. China 274 points (51/12/28).
2. USA 256 (36/38/36), only a very narrow margin.
3. Russia 162
4. Great Britain 117
5. Australia 103
6-10 GER 99, KOR 80, FRA 77, ITA 62, JPN 58
However, this is still not a fair comparison. A fair comparison would give that honour to Jamaica (per population) and Zimbabwe (per GDP). China still has a lot of catch up to do, first with the GDP measure, then the population measure. In 2008 China is ranks 65th in Point/Person, and
50th in GDP. (Forsyth used CIA's PPP measure which is controversial, with nominal GDP China's score shoudl roughly x4, and would rank around 30th, decent but still a long way to go.
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By population (Simon Forsyth)
(note that there are 204 teams competing in Beijing, India's rank of 87th in all measures does not mean it is at the bottom. e.g., India is above HK this year (but behind HK in Athens).
Rank/ Country /Gold/ Silver/ Bronze /Weighted Medals /Weighted Medals /Million
1 Jamaica 6 3 2 32 11.5102
2 Bahamas 0 1 1 3 9.8150
3 Iceland 0 1 0 2 6.6240
4 Bahrain 1 0 0 4 5.6451
5 Norway 3 5 2 24 5.1859
6 Australia 14 15 17 103 5.0406
7 Slovenia 1 2 2 10 4.9770
8 New Zealand 3 1 5 19 4.6164
9 Estonia 1 1 0 6 4.5596
10 Mongolia 2 2 0 12 4.0653
13 Cuba 2 11 11 41 3.5984
14 Georgia 3 0 3 15 3.2286
22 Great Britain 19 13 15 117 1.9251
23 Czech Republic 3 3 0 18 1.7597
24 Korea 13 10 8 80 1.6312
32 France 7 16 17 77 1.2084
33 Germany 16 10 15 99 1.2014
34 Russian Fed. 23 21 28 162 1.1459
35 Ukraine 7 5 15 53 1.1447
36 Canada 3 9 6 36 1.0782
37 Italy 8 10 10 62 1.0662
38 Spain 5 10 3 43 1.0631
41 Romania 4 1 3 21 0.9427
42 Kenya 5 5 4 34 0.9211
43 United States 36 38 36 256 0.8501
44 Zimbabwe 1 3 0 10 0.8123
51 Greece 0 2 2 6 0.5604
52 DPR Korea 2 1 3 13 0.5579
54 Japan 9 6 10 58 0.4551
55 Singapore 0 1 0 2 0.4393
60 Argentina 2 0 4 12 0.2978
61 Ethiopia 4 1 2 20 0.2614
65 China 51 21 28 274 0.2073
66 Thailand 2 2 0 12 0.1844
68 Chinese Taipei 0 0 4 4 0.1750
69 Israel 0 0 1 1 0.1556
70 Brazil 3 4 8 28 0.1474
75 Mexico 2 0 1 9 0.0828
76 Malaysia 0 1 0 2 0.0806
82 Indonesia 1 1 3 9 0.0383
83 Nigeria 0 1 3 5 0.0370
84 Afghanistan 0 0 1 1 0.0314
85 Vietnam 0 1 0 2 0.0235
86 Egypt 0 0 1 1 0.0124
87 India 1 0 2 6 0.0053
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By GDP is linked here (note this is nominal GDP)
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