Team USA Owns the Summer Olympics

T he United States won the most medals in the Summer Olympics, which concluded Sunday, continuing a streak that stretches back to the 2012 games. Team USA had 126 medals, 35 ahead of second-place China. It tied with China for most golds at 40, but won the tiebreaker with a 44–27 edge in silvers.

Looking back, America’s dominance of the Summer Olympics is astonishing. Yet it’s even more a testament to the greatness of the U.S. that Americans manage to win medal after medal without obsessing over the games like totalitarian states do.

Team USA has won the most medals at 19 of the 28 Summer Olympics that have awarded them, going back to 1904. The Soviet Union won the most medals six times. No other country has done it more than once.

The gap in total medal count is comical. The U.S. has won 2,755 Summer Olympics medals all time. In second place is the Soviet Union with 1,010. The Soviets won more medals per Summer Olympics they participated in, but they cheated in basically everything, and the U.S. solved that problem by ending their country. In second place among countries that still exist is Great Britain with 981.

The gap between the U.S. and the rest in specific sports is still more impressive. The U.S. has 861 all-time medals in track and field; Great Britain is second with 220. Three-hundred fifty-eight of those American medals are gold; no other country has more than 64.

In swimming, the U.S. rivalry with Australia is fierce at any given games. But the gap between the two best swimming nations is still huge. The U.S. has 615 medals in swimming; Australia has 230.

In shooting, which doesn’t usually receive much attention, the U.S. is the all-time leader with 121 medals. China is second with 77. Team USA’s 91 rowing medals are also the most all-time, and it is tied with Great Britain for the most rowing golds at 34. The U.S. even has the most gold medals all-time in soccer, and only Brazil has more total medals in the world’s most popular sport (ten vs. nine).

The U.S. Olympic program is so good that simply making it to the Olympics means American athletes have a pretty good chance of winning a medal. A Washington Post analysis found that over 40 percent of the nearly 600 U.S. athletes won a medal at this year’s games.

Individual U.S. states would be among the top medal-winners at this year’s Olympics. Athletes who listed California as their home state won 50 medals, which would be sixth-best of any country, ahead of Japan or Germany.

The Houston Chronicle looked at athletes who are either from Texas or train in Texas. They won 18 gold medals and 43 total medals, which, respectively, would be fourth-most and seventh-most of any nation at the Paris games.

Athletes from the Los Angeles metro area won 27 medals, the same number as all of Canada and seven more than all of Brazil. Athletes from the Indianapolis area (population: 2 million) won eight medals, two more than India (population: 1.5 billion).

Other countries have sports ministries in their governments and put large sums of taxpayer money into their Olympic committees. The U.S. does not have a sports ministry, and the U.S. Olympic and Paralympic Committee (USOPC) does not receive a penny of government funding.

Most USOPC funding comes from sponsorships and licensing. In Olympic years, another big chunk comes from broadcast revenue. The remainder is from private contributions and investment income. The USOPC typically runs a deficit in non-Olympic years and a surplus in Olympic years. Average annual spending for the past three years is about $300 million.

Meanwhile, the Chinese government is estimated to have spent over $1 billion on its Olympic efforts this year, the latest in a long series of massive spending campaigns to elevate athletes for the glory of the Chinese Communist Party. Yet China has only won the most medals once, in the 2008 Summer Olympics that it hosted, and Chinese citizens this year have begun to speak out online against the government spending so much of their money on the Olympics.

The Chinese government is so insecure about its national performance in the games that it cut off the Chinese broadcast of a badminton match this year when the Taiwanese team defeated the No. 1 seed Chinese team to win the gold medal in men’s doubles. China’s state television only broadcast 40 minutes of the 76-minute match, omitting parts where Taiwan was dominating and not showing the medal ceremony or audience celebrations. (Many in the crowd were yelling, “Taiwan No. 1!”)

While there have been isolated incidents of doping, the U.S. runs a very clean Olympic program, especially compared to countries such as the Soviet Union and East Germany in the past and Russia and China today. Russia wasn’t even allowed to compete this year, and there’s no sport Russia won’t cheat in: A Russian athlete was caught doping in mixed-doubles curling at the 2018 Winter Olympics. U.S. swimming dominance would be even greater if the 23 Chinese swimmers who tested positive for banned substances months before the Tokyo Olympics in 2021 had their medals stripped from them.

Despite all of this unparalleled success, most Americans only think about the Summer Olympics once every four years, and even then, many don’t watch. Rather than having state media manufacture patriotism and squash dissent, it’s fashionable to be anti-Olympics in the U.S., with many pieces bashing the games appearing in Olympic years in top publications, including National Review.

And that’s part of what makes U.S. Olympic dominance so awesome: The U.S. wins medals as a side hobby. The government doesn’t fund American athletes at all, and giant U.S. corporations use a fraction of their annual philanthropy or advertising budgets to finance winners. People aren’t expected to watch and cheer if they don’t want to, and TV ratings have fluctuated widely over the past few Olympics. Yet the U.S. just keeps winning, despite other countries’ trying much harder and even cheating in efforts to eclipse Team USA’s medal count.