A water polo team needs its goalkeeper

That post did not age well.  (She gave up 13 goals today, though she did manage to score one of her own...as the goalkeeper.)

The master of the pool resumes her dominance!  She allowed as many goal in the entire game of today's 10-3 win as the USA team scored in just the first six minutes.

Yeah, there are several factors.  Here are the most obvious ones:

• Population of the country
• How many of the citizens are of athletic age
• Economic prosperity (you need to be wealthy enough to take the time to practice instead of working, and your city needs to have a training facility)
• Social appropriateness of women playing sports

I like the idea, but I'm a mathematician.  Is might be too math-intensive for other people.

(edited to correct a typo that inadvertently suggested I was a drug addict.)

I never realised until recently how vastly different numbers of athletes attend from different countries, like some countries will have several hundred, whilst others only have a handful.

I think each is flawed, but ranking by total medals less so.  Just comparing the United States to South Korea by the numbers, if you were to compete in a large number of events on your own, would you rather have one more first place finish instead of a second-place finish, but then have 7 of your other second place finishes and 8 of your third-place finishes become "failed to place"?  That just doesn't make any sense to me.

Was it an own-goal, or are the goals not too far apart to score from your goal?

That post did not age well.  (She gave up 13 goals today, though she did manage to score one of her own...as the goalkeeper.)