Milan-Cortina Olympics: Who Leads the Medal Count?

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

As of Monday at 3:57 p.m. Eastern time, Norway stood atop the official Olympic medal table, which sorts nations by number of gold medals by default. That approach is common in most of the world, with silver and bronze used only to break ties.

By another measure, Italy leads because it has the most medals overall (nine, at last count). Publications in the U.S. often take this approach.

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

The charts below show all the places a country could 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. (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. Set your own by clicking any country’s chart below.