Hello
As most of you know, many people are usually mostly laughing about sites and people who try and come up with predicted medal tables for the Olympics (such as the Infostrada/Gracenote Virtual Medal Table). If there's so much negative response to those kind of things, surely there must be confidence that we can do better without statistical analysis, but with our combined knowledge of the Olympic sports?
I mean, there's no way we're all going to agree on the same things, but looking at the vast amount of knowledge on here about basically every sport, surely we can come up with predictions at least a majority can agree on?
I'm not entirely sure how to exactly complete a total medal table, but we gotta start somewhere. One suggestion might be that you post some predictions on events you think you know enough about, including some in your opinion top favourites, lesser favourites, outsiders and some who would need a huge upset in order to medal. Since we're making a medal table and not individual predictions, it might be useful to note them down as nations instead of individual athletes.
An example might be the following, in which I'm pretending to know a whole lot about the women's discus throw. Five stars is the maximum and is for the top favourites, whereas one star suggests a medal is not impossible, but not very likely (let's say a 5-10% medal chance):
Athletics - Women's discus throw:
* * * * * Croatia (Perkovic), Cuba (Perez & Caballero)
* * * Germany (Fischer & Müller), Australia (Samuels)
* * China (Su, Feng), France (Robert-Michon)
* USA (Ashley, Card), Great Britain (Lally)
Obviously more than one person is welcome to post predictions for the same event, which I could combine into a "total Totallympics prediction".
Horrible idea? Best idea ever? Suggestions?