I see that looking at the medal standings the USA has more total medals than China, but China has significantly more golds. I feel that this disparity isn't given its weight in the medal standings. I figure that each gold should be worth 3pts, silver 2pts, and 1pt for bronze. Once that is in place one could get another perspective on the medal standings instead of just a raw number...but I guess that depends on which country you are from and whether or not the olympics are a quality or quantity sport.

Current standings (http://sports.espn.go.com/oly/summer08/medals)

This puts the USA #1 in number of medals and China #2. However if you use the weighted method above China has 183 pts and USA has 160 (this is based off of 8/20/08 standings from ESPN).