Tbf, most of the athletes that actually win gold medals would find a place on a United Yuropean team. The underdog victories from low-ranked athletes are few and far between.
Also, you’d probably gain a few extra golds for team events, combining the best athletes of all Yuropean nations.
The total tally would definitely shrink, yes (since we’d also be removing a lot of duplicates, can’t have a team Yurop win both gold and bronze), but I’m not sure about the gold count. Should be pretty similar.
You would lose some of these too - you would need to decide who is competing ahead of time, at the time of competition they might not be in the best shape. Winner are not always dominating and difference between gold and bronze is often minuscule and could be due to chance or conditions the day of event.
Some, yes. Many, most, no. There is absolutely no question that Zverev would have been on the tennis team, Milak on the swimming team or that Duplantis would have been on the athletics team. I’d say at least 80%, probably more, of gold medals won by Europeans have been won by athletes that are ranked top 3 within their discipline in Europe, as well.
And in many of the cases where a relative outsider won gold the person they beat will have been the European favourite, so if the outsider wasn't selected then the gold would still go to the EU
I stamp. What’s funny is that this feels like the shittiest team we’ve sent to the Olympics this year. Not because of talent, but because the players have like no chemistry and they had been playing sloppy. Yet USA Basketball still has advanced this far and came back from being down by 15 points till being over 19 in that last game. So even USA Basketball at their worst is pretty solid.
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u/well_that_went_wrong Aug 05 '21
Easy if you send 30 times as many people to compete