Olympic Medal Count - 2012 London Summer Olympics

Olympic Medal Count - 2012 London Summer Olympics

There is no special significance to this, but if the USSR were still together, the medal count would be:

USSR 105
USA 90
China 80

The gold medal count would present a very different picture.

USA 39
China 37
USSR 26

The big disappointment in the gold department has been Russia itself. The Russian athletes have won only 12 golds among their 56 medals (21%). In contrast, the Chinese gold percentage is 46%, and the American gold share is 43%. In fact, the sister republics of the former Soviet Union have actually won more golds than Russia, 14-12.

Twelve of the sister republics have won at least one medal. Only two of the former Soviet republics are empty-handed: Kyrgyzstan (I had to look up the spelling of that one), and Turkmenistan. Kyrgyzstan, which is now a democracy, sent 14 athletes but only one vowel to the games. Turkmenistan, which is slowly trying to emerge from its years as a repressive crazy-ass Stalinist dictatorship, sent 10 athletes.

The first post-Soviet leader of Turkmenistan, Niyazov, was one of my favorite subjects to write about. He was so wacky that he made Kim Jong Il seem as rational as John Stuart Mill. I've seen Sascha Baron Cohen's The Dictator, and I'd have to say that the fictional Admiral-General Aladeen was more sane than Niyazov. In addition to the crazy stuff that all power-mad dictators so, like his flagrant human rights abuses and his dissemination of his own image to every public square, all currency and every postage stamp, Niyazov took absolute power to a whole new level. He renamed months of the year after his family members; he took pensions away from elderly citizens and forced them to pay back funds they had received earlier; he banished dogs; he banned opera and ballet; he outlawed gold teeth; he banned TV news reporters from wearing make-up; he banned libraries; he made doctors swear the Niyazov Oath instead of the Hippocratic; he altered the words of the national anthem and other songs to include references to himself; he built a giant gleaming statue of himself that rotated to face the sun at all times; he arbitrarily fired thousands of public health care employees, etc. That list barely scratches the surface of his lunacy. That's just the stuff I can remember offhand.

My favorite of his zany actions is that he ordered the construction of a palace of ice and penguin enclosure, so that children in his desert country could learn to ice skate. Heaven knows why.

On the other hand, he had his good points. I'm not sure whether he allowed bagpipes (probably not), but he banned mimes, clowns and lip-syncing, so his overall record might be positive.