The WSJ medal predictions underestimated the American Olympic team, as well as the British, and overestimated the Australians
For Team USA it doesn’t get much better than this.
The Americans may not have made a ton of friends in Brazil, given their dust-ups with the law, and all that parading around with an index finger either raised in victory or pointed at other teams’ athletes for being dopers, while Team USA itself had 11 members who had previously tested positive for banned substances.
The medal races became an absolute blowout though-even more than The Wall Street Journal predicted. The US won more medals (121) than it has at any Summer Games except 1984, when many of the Soviet countries boycotted.
AFP, Reuters, The Straits Times
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The Journal got a few things right, or nearly right, in its predictions.
We said the US would win both the overall and gold medal races and that it wouldn’t be very close, largely because US women would be so exceptional. They were. American women out-medaled the men 61-55 and out-golded them 27-18. Another five medals, including one gold, came in mixed competitions.
We had the US winning 42 gold medals. They won 46. We got the order of the top five countries in the overall medal count correct. Predicting Russia was a massive puzzle, since the makeup of their team kept changing. In the end we settled on 16 gold medals and 51 overall. The Russians will leave Rio with 19 gold medals and 56 overall. We had the French winning 12 and 43; they won 10 and 42.
That said there were a few big miscalculations. We expected Great Britain to fall back to earth after its triumphant showing at home in London in 2012, where Team GB won 29 gold medals and 65 overall, beating out the Russians in the gold medal count. (That is the count the rest of the world cares most about.)
Read the full article here
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Reuters, AFP
