True blue, ridgy didge, and all that.

One of the backbones of  Australian culture is the mateship, the true blue behaviour, the ridgy didge honesty, and according to one of our previous prime ministers, having a fair shake of the sauce bottle. You know what I mean? Up-front, above board, fair go and all that.

Well, those dratted Olympics are still on, and nowhere else is it more blatantly obvious that us Ozzies are true blue and ridgy didge. We get behind our athletes, channel 9 TV spends hours covering their exploits, (mind you it covers far more ads than sports), interviewing them, and generally giving those of us who are more housebound, and certainly those of us who don't have paid TV,  a balanced overview of the Olympic world.

NOT!

Sitting in my comfortable leather armchair yesterday the TV presenter made a hurried comment about New Zealand doing better than Aussie in the medal count, but not to mention that! As I have said in other posts, Peter browses the newspapers daily, and guess what he found yesterday.

http://www.stuff.co.nz/sport/olympics/7415429/New-Zealand-races-up-alternative-medal-tables

If you want good, (I won't say unbiased, because I don't think any newspaper is unbiased) but certainly wide coverage of anything, Stuff.co.nz is pretty good. Even when we lived in China we used to get more info about China from this site than anywhere else. But, back to the games. Here is a direct copy/paste from the NZ paper.

"New Zealand's gold medal rowers have pushed the country to the top of the population-based Olympic medal ranking table, and Australia's not too happy about it.

Victory in the rowing pairs and single events overnight, along with a cycling bronze for the men's pursuit team, took the Kiwi medal tally to three gold and three bronze medals.

In contrast to the joy in this country at the performance of our athletes, many Australians are glumly contemplating their meagre - for them - haul of one gold, nine silver and four bronze.
 
So deep is the despair that official free-to-air Australian Olympic broadcaster Channel 9 avoided showing New Zealand's charge up the medal table, which took this country to tenth at one stage before settling at 12th by the end of the day."

Now, if you are watching channel 9, when they show the medal tally, they absolutely do show only the top few medal winning countries, then they plonk Aussie at the bottom.

Now the rub:  Here is a further quote from that newspaper,

"According to an alternative ranking system, New Zealand is first when calculated on a population basis, 11th when the table is based on GDP, and 22nd when based on team size.

The alternative tables are a co-production of the Royal Statistical Society, statisticians from Imperial College in London, and The Guardian's Datablog section.

Apparently these guys did not want to make anything too easy, so they say they have worked out how many medals each country would have won based on a weighted count.
 
Using that approach, when the medal count is population based, New Zealand would have won 21 gold medals by now and 12.6 bronze for a total medal haul of 33.6, while Slovenia would be second with 14.9 gold and 17.9 bronze for a total of 32.8."    End of quote.

So, someone decided they would work things out on a population based method. This would put NZ first, and China way down the bottom.

At the end of the day, I don't worry too much about how many medals anyone has got. I know for a fact that I won't be getting any, nor any of my friends or family. So that takes away the immediacy of the problem.

But at the same time, when living in Australia, a country whose news generally refuses to admit that NZ actually exists, (except for the times the NZ apples bring in some bugs of some sort), it's really hard to get any good up to date news on the NZ Olympic efforts. As for those poor souls from other obscure countries, they will  never get any news of their Olympic exploits, the TV stations wouldn't dream of telling us.

Anyway, the method of giving us the medal tally,  I thought, was a really good example of the good ole true blueness of living in a ridgy didge country where the sauce bottle gets the hole glugged up from underuse.