Go Team USA!

[Gen. Volkov]

You can't reasonably rank any team with a very small medal count anyway no matter how you cut the stats. At the end of the day, the sample size is just too small for your results to be an accurate representation of anything. I'm assuming here that the count is high enough to be useful, so I am talking about ranking the top medal count countries, say everyone over 15 medals.

15 is probably still too small, but that does make more sense.

In a large number of trials, I agree. For 1-3 trial events, it's significant.

I disagree, since most of the mediocre athletes will get knocked out in the prelims. You can't flood the podium with mediocre athletes, because the whole design of the Olympics is to weed out the mediocre ones and pit the best against each other. The finals may be 1 event or a small number, but you have to remember the huge number of preliminary runs that lead up to the finals.