Most Olympic medals by nation: All-time most successful countries
Nations have 987 attempts to add another Olympic medal – of any colour – to their collection this summer.
A tradition that seems to be carried on alongside every Olympics is the debate over how to organise the medal table.
Some national teams and their fans argue for the table comparing medals won per country to be sorted by gold medals first, while some maintain that the overall medal tally is more important. To some, it makes no difference whatsoever.
While that back-and-forth will no doubt rage on again during and after the Paris 2024 Olympics, RadioTimes.com takes a look at where nations rank in the all-time summer Olympic medal table.
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It must be conceded that there are also several ways in which this list could have been compiled, given athletes from some countries used to compete under other national team names at the Olympics.
For the sake of inclusion, we’ve gone ahead and ranked it by the total number of medals won by current nations and all of their "precursors".
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Countries with the most Olympic medals
5. China – 636 medals
China – previously the Republic of China, and more recently the People’s Republic of China – ranks fifth in our list, with 636 total medals at the modern summer Olympics.
They take that spot whichever way you slice it, too, having accrued the fifth-most gold medals with 263 to date.
4. Great Britain – 916 medals
Team GB fans might feel a little hard done by with this ranking, but a total medal tally of 916 is nothing to be sniffed at.
Great Britain has competed at all 29 editions of the modern summer Olympics to rake in that haul, which also includes a fourth-highest-ever count of 284 gold medals.
Had this been ranked by each national Olympic committee team to have competed at the modern summer Olympics, Britain would jump up into third place.
Meanwhile, if we only counted teams which still compete in the same form today, Britain knocks the Soviet Union out of second place.
3. Germany – 1,386
Adding in the medal counts of its previous Olympic team iterations – including West Germany, East Germany and the United Team of Germany – athletes representing Germany have won a total of 1,386 medals at the summer Olympics as of Tokyo 2021.
They similarly rank third for gold medals, with 438 combined, and interestingly are the only nation in this top five to have won more silver medals (457) than gold, and more bronze medals (491) than silver.
Excluding the aforementioned and now-defunct teams or special delegations of German athletes – which competed at five, five and three summer Olympics respectively, winning 204, 409 and 118 medals each in that time – Germany has 655 medals, which would see it ranked fourth or fifth, depending on the other ways of looking at the all-time medal table outlined above.
2. Russia – 1,624 medals
Russia is another complex one to rank given the many titles its athletes have competed under over the years, for various reasons.
If, as we have, you factor in each of its past and present Olympic team iterations – thereby including everything from the Russian Empire and the Soviet Union to the 1992 Unified Team and the 2021 Russian Olympic Committee (ROC) squad – then Russia ranks second in the all-time summer Olympic medal rankings with a total of 1,624.
608 of those are gold, too, another second-place ranking.
The Soviet Union alone racked up 1,010 of those medals in its years of competing at the Olympics before the former transcontinental country officially known as the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR) was dissolved in 1991 – enough to place second on this list when sorted by individual national Olympic committee teams.
Russia alone would rank 12th in that list with 423 medals from its six summer Olympic appearances, while the ROC raked in 71 medals in Tokyo three years ago.
There will also be yet another new delegation name to possibly add to Russian athletes' overall medal tally at Paris 2024, in the form of "Individual Neutral Athletes".
1. United States – 2,629 medals
No matter which way you rank your list of all-time Olympic medal-winning nations, only one country comes out on top: the United States of America.
Competing at every modern Olympics with the exception of the 1980 Games in Moscow, which it led a boycott of, the US has tallied 2,629 Olympic medals to date.
That’s over 1,000 more medals than any other country past or present, including the combined total of 1,624 from Russia and its current or precursor national Olympic committee teams.
Accordingly, the US has also won by far the most Olympic gold medals in history, with a haul of 1,061.
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