This is how the official olympics medal tally looks:

Overall Medal Standings - The official website of the BEIJING 2008 Olympic Games

It’s not only the official tally, but the one linked from google each time you type “olympics” and terms like “australia olympics”. Thus making it an absurdly popular page at this time. As you can see, the design is reedeeeculous. The thing you want to see the most - total medal tally - is several miles away from the country. It’s good they’ve used alternative shading for odd and even rows, but even so, it’s still difficult to see the connection. Especially since the gold/silver/bronze tallies are shown in a different colour.

Did you notice even “open/mixed” gets preferential treatment? Look, I can’t even think of an open/mixed event at the olympics. Ballroom dancing? Friendly game of trumps? All I’m saying is, I’d rather see the headline figures first. I don’t know how many gazillion dollars the official IT contract went for, but this is what the tally should look like according to table design 101:

Overall Medal Standings - The official website of the BEIJING 2008 Olympic Games

(BTW I also pulled total to the front and emphasised it. Matter of opinion whether to go by total number versus number of golds.)

(The following images are just to record the fact it’s linked from Google since it won’t be linked much longer.)

olympics - Google Search

australia olympics - Google Search