2012 Olympics

Germany won the men's hockey. That doesn't mean Germany had the best team. There is no way to objectively determine the 'best' team. If we could replay the Germany-Holland final a thousand times, do you think Germany would win it a thousand times? Of course not. We don't know what the final outcome would be, but Germany would certainly lose several matches.The more teams you have, the more chance you have to win. I'm not sure what's difficult to understand about this. Would it help to provide a list of thousands of sporting fictures won by an inferior team?As for whether the US had athletes at home who could have beaten other country's medallists, of course they did. So did several other countries. Olympic events typically allow between one and three entrants per country. In some of the events where more than one is allowed, we can see that the same country wins two or three medals.

If we changed the athletics conditions to one athlete per country, this year it would have cost the US 4 silvers and 4 bronzes this year. That's just athletics. If we did the same with all disciplines in all events, it would lose the US a further four silver and three bronze - so eight silvers and seven bronzes in total.

A few too many replies to reply to each one individually, so I thought I'd just bung a general reply in here.On consideration, I'm still confident that an unrestricted Olympics would win the US more than just one extra bronze - they'd win quite a few more bronzes and silvers.However, when arguing with Straggler, I was coming from a position of it only being the US that sent more athletes, because of his bizarre refusal to accept the obvious fact that more entrants means more chance of winning. If all restrictions were removed, there's a good chance it could lose the US a few bronzes in the sports where other countries specialise. To grab one example, South Korea and China could probably field a few more Olympic quality archery teams, which would have made the USA's silver in that event harder to win.I still think the USA would benefit overall, however, since most of the events I could think of in which the US couldn't field more competitive atheletes, like fencing and weightlifting, for example, they didn't get a single medal anyway.

I'm not sure why you're so resistant to this idea, nor why you keep representing it as a dichotomy between 'more entrants' and 'being better'. By arguing that entering more teams is an advantage, I am not claiming that the quality of teams is irrelevant. The better the team, the more chance it has of winning. This is obvious. But, imagine the two following scenarios:Scenario A - Countries A, B, C, D all enter one team each, their best team.
Scenario B - Countries A, B and C all enter their best team. Country D enters their best 15 teams.Now, in which scenario is country D more likely to win gold? In Scenario B, they're almost guaranteed to have a team in the final, and then, even if it is not the better team, once there it always has a chance of winning on the day. And it's not like the difference in quality between, for example, Germany's best basketball team and the USA's fourth best basketball team is equivalent to the difference between a Premiership club and a pub side.That's all that's being argued here. Having more entrants gives you more chance of winning. It obviously doesn't guarantee it. That's not what I said, though. I pointed out that it would benefit other countries as well. Any country or group of countries who are dominant in a particular sport would benefit from having the caps removed. Rowing's an obvious one, since it's one that limits entrants to one per country. The top rowing countries, like Britain, Australia and Hungary would be able to get two of three medals in the same events, which now they can't. Allowing a third entrant in badminton would help China get an extra bronze or two. It would benefit any country that has more Olympic quality competitors than they are currently allowed to submit.Like I said, overall, I think it would add a few medals to the US' count.