Here's a related question: if you were in charge of directing a country's Olympic program, with the goal of maximizing the number of medals your team one, what sports would you develop? You'd have to balance competitiveness versus number of available medals.

Here's a link to get started:

http://www.london2012.com/schedule-and-results/

The moral of the story, of course: medal counts are dumb. What these athletes can do is the real story.

You have to view all of this from the perspective of the lens we see it through, which is that of the media. Medal counts are good for only one thing, and that's for creating drama and making us interested so that we'll tune in. The "bigger" that we think a particular event is, the more likely we are to tune in, and the more money the media outlets make. Simple as that.

Not sure I understand you're buddy's butterfly-versus-breaststroke point at all. Very different events from my perspective.

Interesting article from Washington post. Medal counts are indeed questionable, but if you scale them by country population, smaller countries look really good.

On a related note, here is an excerpt from a discussion between Malcolm Gladwell (of "Outliers" fame) and Bill Simmons, a sportswriter for ESPN, talking about the problem of identifying talent. It's one of the most interesting cultural divides in my opinion - what sports different countries value, and what happens as a consequence:

(the full link is here, but most of the exchange is on other topics. Though Gladwell has written about this extensively: http://www.grantland.com/story/_/id/8016432/gladwell-vs-simmons-iv)

GLADWELL: And then there is my favorite moment in Michael Lewis's The Blind Side, when Michael Oher says that if everyone from his old neighborhood in inner-city Memphis who could play football got the chance to play professional football, they'd need two NFLs. What he was saying is that the efficiency rate of the football talent-search system in Memphis was less than 50 percent. This is the most popular and most lucrative sport in the United States — and Oher is saying that based on his experience we leave half of the available talent on the table. That's unbelievable!

SIMMONS: It's a little different than Canada — where they somehow utilize 147.3 percent of the available hockey talent.

GLADWELL: Exactly right. Not to mention the Kenyans in distance running, and the Dutch in soccer, and the Jamaicans in sprinting. It's the flip side of the same point. In theory, big countries should dominate all sports because they have the biggest talent pool. But they don't, because societies squander their talent. If you are a tiny country you can hold your own against someone 10 times your size just by being slightly more efficient in finding and developing the Battiers and Kingstons of the world.