Not that long ago, as a kid running wild in Western Australia, I was under the impression that no competing nation ever "won" the Olympic Games, nor was there ever an official medal count.

Sure, athletes were awarded medals for coming first, second, or third in various events but the whole big party was just that - a celebration not a competition.

Oh, happy days.

But please spare me ridicule; this was not the Jurassic Games but the relatively more recent early 1980s. This was the era of Moscow boycotts, Los Angeles boycotts, and more East-West rivalry than a compass at the North Pole.

The Australian Institute of Sport had only recently been conceived as a laboratory of future success. Actually, maybe it was a long time ago.

Still, it was years later that I realised medal rankings actually did exist. This was almost a coming of age, a shedding of innocence, a teenage revelation that ranked alongside breasts and beer.

What do you mean the USA is tops? On TV all we ever saw were Australians winning medals. You mean other countries win as well? How can we be ninth in this tally of talent?

Interestingly, the Olympic Charter, an idealistic manifesto from 1924 that was supposed to lay everything out for evermore, clearly states, "The IOC and the OCOG (the local Organizing Committee of the Olympic Games) shall not draw up any global ranking per country."

In 1992, which was probably when I first noticed, the IOC made some sort of concession to international rivalry and issued a tally of medal winners but did not hand out an official ranking. That was left to media organisations and that is where things get interesting.

Just like Metric and Imperial measures, there are two rival systems in place for Olympic rankings, which makes the spat between Kate Ellis, Australia's Minister for Sport and her British counterpart Gerry Sutcliffe, even more absurd than it was originally.

Ellis and Sutcliffe kicked off the Olympics with some trans-continental sledging about which country - Australia or Great Britain - would win more medals at Beijing.

The minister from the nation with the least medals would have to wear an item of clothing bearing the colours of the other. Yes, this is how politicians amuse themselves.

In Ellis and Sutcliffe's bet they no doubt failed to establish which system they will follow.

Here’s the catch.

One theory is to rank countries according to the total number of gold medals won only. This group includes the IOC (which should be the official system), the Australian Olympic Committee, the Sydney Morning Herald newspaper, and SBS.

After Day 11 of competition, this would make the medal tally table look like so:

China 39
USA 22
Great Britain 12
Australia 11
Germany 9

Others, including the Associated Press and the New York Times (yes, they are both US media outlets), rank countries according to total medals won.

For Day 11 of competition, that would put the table like so:

USA 72
China 67
Russia 36
Australia 33
Great Britain 27

Take that China!

And take that, sort of, Great Britain.

Of course, it could be said, who cares? But the fact is that many nations skew their government funding of sports based on the prospects of winning an Olympic medal.

Australia, which has a romantic notion of egalitarianism, is among these countries. An aspect in allocating Federal government funding for respective sports is performances at previous games. So, if you screw up in synchronised diving, for example, next Olympics you might be taking the slow boat to London.

The maths then becomes brutal. Gold is good, apparently, and maybe all we want to see. It's great for the international profile and good for the warm fuzzy feeling that envelops the country when Stephanie Rice steps up onto the dais.

It's apparently also fantastic when, at the end of these games, we look up that final tally and see Australia firmly in fourth.

Or is it fifth?

Anyone for sixth?

I’m so confused.