O'rly?
Olympic medal table - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
"The convention used by the IOC is to sort by the number of gold medals the athletes from a country have earned. In the event of a tie in the number of gold medals, the number of silver medals is taken into consideration, and then the number of bronze medals. If two countries have an equal number of gold, silver, and bronze medals, they are ordered in the table alphabetically by their IOC country code."
"As the IOC does not consider its sorting of nations to be an official ranking system, various methods of ranking nations are used."
"The gold first ranking system described above is used by most of the world media, as well as the IOC. However, in the United States it is more common to publish medal tables ordered by the total number of medals won, although the gold first ranking has been used on occasion, including in the official report of the 2002 Winter Olympics, the most recent Games held in the United States."
They lost to China in gold medals during 2008 so they have to start using overall medal count. That is the only way they can justify sending that many athletes and not win the most gold.