I think I possibly disagree with your definition of a 'reasonable' ranking system. I would be interested to see one which took into account the population of each country, on the grounds that medals (of each type) per person would be a better way of finding out which countries are more likely to produce winners.

Unfortunately, once you go down that route the next thing people will point out is that it's population in the appropriate age range. In Swaziland, for example, something like 40% of the population is aged 16-30, where in Japan the proportion is nearer 20%. Then there will be attempts to normalise for development status, provision of sports facilities, etc.

I agree, but I did specifically say on the page that for these purposes I was considering reasonable absolute rankings of just the medal count, and that rankings taking into account external factors of that nature were beyond the scope of the analysis.

(Apart from anything else, rankings scaled per head of population or per dollar GDP have a tendency to stop making sense once the medal counts get small enough to be statistically insignificant, which means that most of the interesting bits of your table are full of unhelpful anomalies.)

Sorry! Must have missed that bit.