It’s amazing that it took 128 years, but the final medal table of the 33rd Summer Olympic Games in Paris is the first instance of two countries being tied for the most Gold Medals at a modern Summer Olympics.

This time around, the United States and China were famously tied on 40 Gold Medals after the US narrowly won the final event of the Paris Olympics, the Women’s Basketball final against host nation France, which ensured that for the first time in history, Silver Medals would be used to determine the most successful nation at an Olympic Games, with the US ahead of the PRC 44-27 to ‘win’ the world’s greatest pissing contest for the fourth consecutive time.

This all coming after Tokyo 2020 saw the countries split by just 1 Gold Medal (41-40), the first time the Gold Medal table had been decided by a margin of 1 Gold medal since Athens in 1896 (The US ahead of Greece 11-10), with the decisive event in Tokyo, as it was in Paris, being the Women’s Basketball Final, won by the United States.

However, a tie for first does mean that China became just the third country to at least share top spot of a Summer Olympic Gold Medal count outside of home soil, joining the Americans (14 times) and the former Soviet Union (5 times) as the only countries to achieve the mark…

That also doesn’t include the Unified Team that competed in Barcelona in 1992 and topped both Medal Counts, with the team being made up of 12 of the 15 ex-Soviet republics who didn’t yet have their Olympic Committees recognised by the IOC due to the timing of the Soviet Union’s dissolution.

Historically, the only other previous instance of two countries tying for the most Gold Medals at an Olympic Games is the 1948 Winter Olympics in St Moritz (The first Olympic Games held after World War II), when Norway and Sweden had a perfect tie of 3 Gold Medals, 4 Silver Medals and 3 Bronze Medals, thus both countries shared top spot.

Still, the IOC themselves, through then President Jacques Rogge, have stated on record (On the last day of the 2008 Beijing Olympics) that they do not have a stance on one form of medal counting over another, the subject seemingly coming up after several American media outlets started sorting medal counts through total medals in Beijing, given China topped the US on Gold Medals 48-36 (It was 51-36 before 3 weightlifting Golds for China were quashed in 2017), while the US finished ahead 112-100 on Total Medals.

“I believe each country will highlight what suits it best. One country will say, ‘Gold medals.’ The other country will say, ‘The total tally counts.’ We take no position on that.”

Jacques Rogge, August 24, 2008

It makes you think, with the way Great Britain racked up Silver and Bronze Medals during the final week in Paris, I don’t think the BBC are too far behind joining the American media in shifting the goalposts.