How is the Olympic medal table ranked?
There is no official Olympic medal table. The International Olympic Committee explicitly states that it does not recognise a ranking of countries, on the principle that the Games are contests between athletes rather than nations.
What exists in practice are two competing conventions, and which one a country's media uses tends to depend on which flatters it.
Gold first is the more widely used method internationally. Countries are ordered by number of gold medals; silver breaks ties, then bronze. Under this system a nation with 10 golds and no other medals outranks one with 9 golds and 40 silvers. The IOC's own website displays results this way by default, while still declining to call it a ranking.
Total medals ranks by the combined count of gold, silver and bronze. This is the convention normally used by American media, and it produces a visibly different order — in several recent Games the United States has led the total count while another nation led the gold count.
Neither is more correct. They measure different things: gold-first rewards winning, total rewards breadth.
Other systems circulate without official standing, including weighted points systems (typically 3–2–1) and rankings adjusted for population or GDP, which produce dramatically different results and usually put small nations at the top.
A few practical wrinkles: team events award one medal per event regardless of squad size, so a single basketball gold counts the same as a single 100m gold. Ties for a medal position result in duplicate medals being awarded, and in boxing two bronzes are awarded by design, with no third-place playoff.