About the producing medal tables by country as the Olympics "is" a competition between individual athletes - I had heard that but hadn't seen "chapter and verse" (so to speak). Interesting; thanks!

Still, the diagram is nifty, as is the fact that the NYT picked it up and credited Simon!

Indeed, and clearly medal tables are an important aspect of the Olympics, despite the IOC's quixotic position, and the parametric kind of scoring which you see is very unsatisfactory. I really like identities, nulls, matrix kernels, and so on, and so was (perhaps a little too) enthusiastic when this one came to mind!