Tuesday Map: Medal Count

This week's Tuesday Map comes via the New York Times.

The Times provides a cool interactive graphic that shows overall medal counts for each participating country at every summer Olympiad stretching back to 1896. Below, the 2004 Athens Games:

As you'll see as you click around the graphic, the United States' greatest athletic adversary was always the Soviet Union. Yet China has been hot on America's heels at recent summer games, and has vigorously prepared its athletes to beat the United States in Beijing. China has been emphasizing sports that award more medals, such as rowing, in a savvy effort to garner as many medals as possible. Can the Chinese do it? And if they do, how will the world react?

As FP contributor Jacob Leibenluft wrote last year, beating the United States could have political ramifications:

[E]ven if organizers can somehow pull off an Olympics free of both pollution and protestors, they can't control what happens on the field. And ironically, just as China’s leaders emphasize its "peaceful rise," the athletic juggernaut in which they have invested so much may inadvertently send the opposite message.

Watch this space.