The U.S. Olympic team finished atop the gold-medal standings at the Tokyo Olympics with 39 as the Americans edged past China on the final day of action.
Team USA’s 39 golds surpasses the totals it managed at five of the previous eight Summer Games and marks the 11th-most golds it has won at a Summer Olympics.
The USA also topped the standings at Tokyo 2020 for the most overall medals with 113 (41 silver and 33 bronze), making this the Americans’ second-most-successful Olympics since Los Angeles in 1984. (They won 121 at the 2016 Games in Rio de Janeiro.)
Host Japan finished in third place with 27 gold medals, while Great Britain was fourth (22). The U.S.’s 113 total medals were 25 ahead of China, with the ROC in third at 71 and Great Britain in fourth with 65.
Despite waning enthusiasm around the world for hosting the Olympics, French organizers are bullish that Paris 2024 will be a major success.
French President Emmanuel Macron recited the Olympic motto on Sunday from atop the Eiffel Tower and then declared “We are ready!” as Paris Mayor Anne Hidalgo accepted the Olympic flag in Japan during an official handover from Tokyo.
French officials are confident the 2024 Games will have Olympic naysayers eating their words. That’s thanks to the city’s abundance of existing first-class venues, coupled with the organizers’ request for a comparatively modest €7.3 billion estimated budget.
Of that, just €1 billion is set to come from taxpayers, the rest from private funding and ticket sales.
The Tokyo event cost between $22 billion and $28 billion — dwarfing an initial projection of $7.3 billion, a figure ominously in line with the current Paris budget estimate.
The Japanese overspend follows a pattern of host cities blowing past their budget on delivering the Olympics, while leaving white elephant stadia — notably in Athens and Rio de Janeiro — in their wake.