Get Ready for a U.S. Romp

Restored from the Empower Network archive (2011–2017), lightly edited to meet our current advertising standards. Views are the original author’s.

Time to unfurl Old Glory and break out the red, white and blue boxer shorts.

And for the fifth consecutive Summer Games, the U.S. should finish atop the overall medal table.

China’s victory in the gold-medal race in 2008 was supposed to herald the arrival of the newest Olympic superpower, a vast country with 1.3 billion people and a proven government-sponsored training program. Even at the U.S. Olympic Committee headquarters in Colorado Springs, there was a growing sense that China would win the most gold and overall medals in 2012.

Instead, London should vindicate America’s decentralized and entrepreneurial approach to developing the world’s best athletes. The Wall Street Journal’s projections show Team U.S.A.’s 530 athletes should leave London with 40 gold medals and 108 overall, topping the Chinese, who are projected to collect 38 gold medals and 92 overall.

The Journal’s forecasting system takes into account basic information such as interviews with experts and the performances of athletes in recent national and international competitions. But rather than simply anointing first-, second- and third-place finishers in each event and calling it a day, the model assigns probabilities to the top medal contenders, then uses those probabilities to project the most likely outcomes.

For instance, the U.S. women’s basketball team, which hasn’t lost a game at the Olympics since 1992, is an 80% favorite to win the gold by our count—while the next most likely winners come in at 10%. Serbian tennis star Novak Djokovic, who has to prevail over stiff competition from Roger Federer and hometown favorite Andy Murray, has just a 40% chance for gold. After tallying those probabilities, we enlisted sports actuary John Dewan, owner of Baseball Info Solutions, to run 1,000 simulations of the Games.

The results were emphatic: The U.S. won or tied for the most medals 998 times. And while the gold-medal race was less certain, the U.S. won it 746 times to 304 for China. There were 57 ties and seven scenarios in which Russia was a surprise winner.

Some events were so close they were tough to handicap. This year, there’s a cracker of a match before the Opening Ceremony even takes place, as the U.S. women’s soccer team takes on a talented French side in a rematch of their 2011 World Cup semifinal. We expect the U.S. to survive on the strength of deadly scoring duo Abby Wambach and Alex Morgan, and to earn a medal, but the match shouldn’t be missed.

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