Freakonomics blog has a short bit on bias in reporting of Olympic rankings:
MiG has it right
I think ranking by gold medals is the recommended method by the IOC.
To me, there’s nothing wrong with the US medias ranking countries by overall total medals. Only in America, nothing really matter to us anyway (since most American news medias are just a pile of sh*t).
The BBC has a nice article giving five different methods for ranking countries based upon medals - see news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/magazine/7576446.stm - very interesting.
Total Medals Won - United States
Points per medal (Gold 3 Silver 2 Bronze 1) - China
Population per medal - Bahamas
GDP - Billion Dollars per medal - North Korea
Number of Atheletes at Games per medal Won - Uzbekistan
Have a look at the article - opens your eyes.
[quote=“MiG”]
I would question this bit,[/quote]
Of course you would! The opposite would have been surprising.
I thought about this but I wanted to find a way to express the lower amount of medals available at the winter games, when we do better. I didn’t express my “equalization” comment properly.
I could have done the following calculations for example:
We could find a way to even out the number of medals for both olympics.
Let’s find the multiplier to achieve this:
5274/1183 yields a factor of 4.458 which, when applied to the winter games, becomes a potential of 361 medals (4.458 x 81) for Canada and 27 medals for Australia. The totals would now be 252 for Australia and 455 for Canada. I think that even if you factor in the population, we still come out ahead.
Well that’s what I did in my calculations and I have no shame in doing so since I like winter sports more than summer ones 
But, you know, there are lies, damn lies and statistics
Well, I don’t lie!
But that’s not a fair comparison, then, because you’re giving more weight (almost 5 times as much) to events in the winter olympics for the simple fact that there are fewer of them.
It doesn’t compare the two nations’ medals, it’s just a comparison of 80% winter olympics and 20% summer olympics. Not a fair comparison at all.
In fact, why include the summer olympics in a comparison at all, if you’re only going to give it a 20% weight?
Just compare Canada versus Australia in Winter Olympic events, and ignore the Summer ones. Same result, in my opinion. Denial.
You’re saying that a speedskating medal should be worth 5 swimming medals just because you like Winter better, and therefore Canada kicks Australia’s ass. When the complete opposite is the reality – Australia does much better.
In desperate America, bronze is the new gold. 
EPIC FAIL
1- If we compare Canada at the Winter Olympics vs Australia at the Summer Olympics, we still did better than them: They won 4.266% of the Summer medals and our athletes won 6.847% of the medals despite the fact that our athletes’ pool is way more divided amongst the two Olympics than theirs.
2- Of course a gold medal in “Ice” hockey is worth 5 medals in ribbon-on-a-stick-and-throw-the-darn-ball rhythmic gymnastics! Just ask Don Cherry. 
And who cares about fairness? I didn’t post up this to be fair, I wanted to use the numbers to make us look good. (lies, damn lies and…),
Did Don Cherry recently receive the Order of Canada?
In light of some of the recipients I hope he rejected it.
I might add I’m not a big fan of Don cherry.