It's a small comfort that statistically, NZ rules

 New Zealand really is the best sports nation in the world. Really.

Well, according to a system developed by this writer which was designed to figure out who, out of China and the United States was the best sporting nation. Surprisingly, the figures threw up two nations as clearly the best: New Zealand and Australia.

The over-riding question at these games is how to put China's current gold medal dominance into perspective. China has a stated policy of winning gold at all costs, so much so the public has been trained to treat silver like failure. At the time of writing, China's 27 golds out-stripped the Americans' 17 but the Americans had a total of 57 medals to China's 49.

What's better. More medals, or more golds. Clearly gold is important; if one country took only 10 bronze and another took only nine gold, you wouldn't say the country with 10 medals was better than the one with nine gold.

But the silver and bronze medals matter. They matter to those who get them, as Hayden Roulston showed on Saturday night. And the so-called minor medals also reflect depth.

So how to resolve this dilemma. How about a system that gives three points for gold, two for silver and one for bronze. On that system, China  outpoints the USA by a narrow 116 to 109 which is probably a fair representation of how things have played out.

But what about the fact China's population is around four times that of the USA? With a bigger athletic pool to draw on, China should theoretically be well ahead of the Americans. That may well be the case in years to come; right now China is still an emerging nation at the Olympics whereas the US is well-established and with proven medal-producing systems in place.

Let's assume then that a points system for medals won is divided by population to get a per capita measure of how well the leading nations have performed so far at the games.

On this system, the two powerhouses are New Zealand and Australia.

New Zealand has 10 points for two golds, a silver and two bronze, which is divided by a population of four million for a score of 2.5. Australia has 47 points divided by a population of 20 million for a score of 2.35.

It's a fluid system given that 24 hours earlier New Zealand had no medals and a score of 0.0. And if American swimmer Michael Phelps was a nation of one he would have a score of 24: eight gold medals divided by one.

But for what it's worth, Kiwis can bask in the continued glory of Super Saturday by revelling in the fact that for a small country we do pretty well.

- © Fairfax NZ News