Medal table · Summer Olympics, {{firstYear}}-{{lastYear}}
Summer Olympic medal table, edition by edition and by national olympic committee, in four views: gold, silver, bronze and total. The IOC's official ranking goes by number of titles, gold outranking any quantity of silver — but the press in several countries, including the United States, ranks by total medals, which sometimes changes the winner.
Wikipedia medal tables, edition by edition. Entities that no longer exist are kept as they competed — the USSR, East and West Germany, the Unified Team — and not redistributed to their successor states: redistributing would amount to rewriting the record.
The slider moves from one edition to the next. Relating medal counts to population or GDP produces an entirely different ranking, dominated by small countries such as Jamaica, New Zealand and Hungary.
Olympic sport has been an openly instrumental tool of power: the Eastern bloc dominated the tables from the 1950s to the 1980s, with a state programme and organised doping that is now documented. The mutual boycotts of Moscow 1980 and Los Angeles 1984 make those two editions incomparable with the rest. China, absent from the Games until 1984, has been contesting first place with the United States since 2008.