Norm Smith Medal Votes Ignore the Final Scoreboard

Five judges, thirty seconds of arithmetic

A panel of five watches the match. Each member independently hands out three votes to the player they thought was best, two to the second best and one to the third. Nobody is asked to weight the result. Fifteen votes is therefore the theoretical maximum, and a player who polls with all five panellists is unusual.

Ties are broken by countback: most three-vote awards first, then most twos, and if the panel is still deadlocked the chair decides. Only one player has ever won on that tiebreaker, Paul Chapman in 2009. Chapman was the man who hung the 2026 medal around Bolton's neck, which is the sort of coincidence the game produces without being asked.

Judd voted for the player doing what Judd once did

That table holds my favourite detail of the afternoon. Judd gave Bolton the maximum, and Judd is on the list of medallists who lost, having won it for West Coast in 2005. Voss gave Bolton the maximum too, twenty-three years after captaining the Brisbane side that began the club's first run of three straight premierships, on an afternoon when Brisbane completed its second.

McLeod, chairing, split the other way and gave his three to Brisbane's Dayne Zorko. A five-person panel voting independently produces exactly that: a genuine disagreement, settled by addition rather than argument.

The five who won it in defeat

• 1982: Maurice Rioli, Richmond, beaten by Carlton
• 1989: Gary Ablett senior, Geelong
• 2002: Nathan Buckley, Collingwood
• 2005: Chris Judd, West Coast
• 2026: Shai Bolton, Fremantle

Rioli was first in two ways on the same afternoon: the first Indigenous player to win the award and the first from a losing team. His football life was already unusual before Richmond signed him, with back-to-back Simpson Medals in South Fremantle's WAFL grand finals of 1980 and 1981. It kept being unusual afterwards. He sat in the Northern Territory Legislative Assembly as the member for Arafura from 1992 to 2001, and his son was drafted to Richmond under the father-son rule in 2020.

Why winners usually take it anyway

No rule anywhere says the medal goes to the victors, and I could not find a clause in the award's conditions that even leans that way. The structure of the game does the work instead. A team that wins a grand final has usually won the contested ball, which means its best player has spent the afternoon with the ball in his hands while the losing side's best has been chasing. Judges reward what they can see.

Bolton's afternoon broke through that because the numbers were hard to argue with: 26 disposals, the most of any Fremantle player, with 10 contested possessions, nine score involvements, nine inside 50s, seven marks, five tackles and 686 metres gained. He had 13 disposals by half time and eight more in a final quarter his team lost.

What the medal is actually named for

Norm Smith won four premierships as a Melbourne player and six more as the club's coach, and the medal in his name has been awarded since the 1979 grand final. Since 2004 the presentation has been handled by former medallists rather than officials, which is why the 2026 ceremony put one past winner in front of the next. Dustin Martin holds the record with three.

That is a generous piece of design, and we would rather see it left alone. The competition already has a trophy for the best team, and it has never needed the individual award to agree with it.