The rank being on the left is like a row index. It helps you count without needing to count from the beginning of the column. For this reason, many data-oriented languages like R don’t even consider the row index to be part of the data.

If anything the ranking reinforces the idea that a given country is in a given position which is the overall structure and intent of the data (in my view). I’m not likely to look at the table to extract the fact that “7 gold medals is 17th place.” I’m going to see that “country X is 17th place.”