Who are the favourites for gold at Paris 2024?
With the first events of the Paris 2024 Olympics already underway, it's time to talk about medals. In Tokyo 3 years ago, USA topped the overall medal table by the narrowest of margins, with only a single gold medal more than China. If that wasn't enough to ensure a fierce battle between the two this time around, the fact that the USA is investigating Chinese anti-doping (while apparently neglecting their own) is certainly fuel to that fire.
To preview that storyline as well as gauge how well other nations will do in Paris, let us dip our foot in the water and take a look at who the favourites are for each event and where they come from. This will also tell us the favourite for the overall medal tally. These are NOT my predictions (those are coming up later - follow on X to stay tuned), but rather an effort to identify who the pre-event favourites are on paper, for each event - without my personal biases creeping in. Let us first summarise where the favourites are from, to get a sense of the hopes each nation carry into Paris. I will explain the numbers below, but here's what we get.
Who has the most?
This says a lot already, even before getting into actual medal predictions. We can identify several storylines to look out for through the Games. Firstly, USA will of course still be the favourites for the overall medal table. Secondly, we can expect USA and China to dominate once again (unsurprisingly), but we can also expect it to be close once again, which is far less obvious and very exciting. The battle for the gold medal tally could come down to the wire. Japan and Great Britain seem better placed than many might have thought, while France will need to rely on home turf to try and push for more golds. The journey of French athletes is certainly worth following to see if they can outperform the form book to challenge the other nations for 3rd place. Another observation is that USA and China have a very high number of favourites on paper, 92 between them. But that merely reflects the fact that some countries with fewer resources tend to really focus on and peak at the Olympics, which means they don't go in as favourites. Historically, there is much better spread and the top 2 do not win that many golds at the Games, so we should probably keep an eye out for potential upsets that could shake things up. Finally, India have the potential for multiple golds for perhaps the first time ever.
Here is the full table with how the remaining nations stack up with gold medal favourites.
Hungary have some very strong squads heading to Paris that will carry high hopes. Uzbekistan, bolstered by Boxing, could do a lot better than many expect. Ethiopia could well have the edge over neighbours Kenya, at least on paper, while many of Jamaica's stars have enjoyed a less-than-ideal run-in to the Games.
The Favourites
Let us now delve into the numbers. These are not based on my favourite athletes or predictions for who will win each event (that will come on the 26th). Those may be biased and influenced by my opinions. The effort here is to identify the 'objective favourite' heading into each event. This is to set a benchmark for what to expect in Paris, without SI's american bias or Gracenote's opacity (as good as both prediction efforts are). The idea is just to set up some of the larger storylines as above and contextualise the events at the Games so that we know at least one athlete to look out for in each.
For each sport, I have just tried to identify the best metric of performance within the sport, leading up to the Games. This involves some judgement from me but the criteria is mostly built-in to the sport itself, like world rankings or world championships. Below there is a table summarising the criteria for each sport, but first, let's take a look at all the pre-event favourites for all 329 events at Paris 2024.
Criteria
How do we know the 'objective favourite'? Every sport has certain in-built metrics we could use to judge the strongest athlete coming into the Olympics. These include championships, world cups, rankings, records, etc. Essentially, what I've done is looked at each sport and identified which metric best describes the favourite or best performer going into the Games. For some these are rankings, certain competitions, or a combination of the two. There is a level of subjectivity in my choice of metric, of course, but far less than me choosing my favourite for each event. This is because the metric itself comes from within the sport and I have stuck to the chosen metric even where I might not agree with a specific event within, expect for a few exceptions where there are some obviously superior alternatives.
For swimming, the criteria is the top qualifier in the event going into Paris, i.e. the top time recorded during the qualification window which includes both the 2023 & 2024 Worlds and all Olympic trials. This holds up well for all events. It is similar for Athletics, where I have taken the top performer to date since the beginning of the qualification period for Paris, with a few exceoptions for injury troubles, non-participation, or certain outlier performances (e.g. one-off throws with overly favourable conditions). The trickiest was perhaps Boxing, where there is no unified governing body so no global competition in recent times. I have turned to BoxRec (the most comprehensive record of amateur boxing results) and their rankings based on recent results. The table below summarises the criteria to choose the favourite for each sport.