Lies, damned lies, etc. In particular, sorting by excess medals favors large countries a lot. For example, can you imagine Grenada or Cyprus to win 10 excess medals? I would compute actual/expected, not actual-expected as the measure.
Why did you add the word "True" to the title?
To further distinguish from an earlier HN post that also mentioned adjusted medal rank.
Well, any adjusted medal rank is synthetic, so declaring one as true is quite arbitrary.