Paris Olympics: Who Leads the Medal Count?

Which country is doing best at the Paris Olympics? It depends on who’s counting medals — and how.

As of Monday at 5:08 p.m. Eastern time, Japan stood atop the official Olympic medal table, which sorts nations based on their number of gold medals. That approach is common in much of the world, with silver and bronze used only to break ties.

By another measure, the United States leads because it has the most medals overall (20, at last count). Publications in the U.S., including The New York Times, often take this approach.

Which way of counting is superior? It’s possible neither is. Maybe the ideal method is somewhere in between.

That’s where you come in.

The charts below show all the places a country might land on a medals table, given different ways of measuring the relative worth of a gold medal to a silver, and a silver to a bronze. It’s up to you to decide which is best, with one obvious limitation: A gold can’t be worth less than a silver, and a silver can’t be worth less than a bronze. (Bronze medals are always worth one point.)

If you care only about golds, that’s the upper-right corner. If you consider all medals equal, that’s the lower-left corner. Everywhere in between is another plausible scoring method. We’ll update this page as more medals come in.

If one gold medal is worth _
and one silver is worth _
ranks .