Overview and Motivation
With the Olympic games happening this past summer, we noticed that mainstream coverage of the Olympics in the US typically covers only a few sports, and the reporters only talk about our top athletes in each one. We rarely have the opportunity to watch the sports outside of the popular ones that the US tends to do well in. We were interested in gathering data on all Olympic sports and learning about things like which countries have historically been the most dominant in each sport, how countries have ranked over Olympic history, and whether there is any home field advantage when hosting the Olympics.
Using the Site
World Map
Countries are colored by their total number of medals earned. Hover over any country to see its name
and its total medal count in each category. Zoom and drag on the map to view smaller countries. Click
on a country to populate a chart view on the side of the page and a button to go to the individual
country page.
Athletes Page
Search for an athlete in the sidebar, and click on them to view how many Olympic medals they have won,
in addition to their distribution of gold, silver, and bronze medals.
Sports Page
Search for an Olympic sport in the sidebar, and click on one to select it. See the top five countries
in any sport (ordered by total medals won), in addition to the top athletes (highest medal earners).
Click on an athlete to visit their individual athlete page.
Country Page
Search for any country in the sidebar, and click on one to select it. See the top five sports for the
country, or all sports they have medalled in if they have medalled in less than five sports. Also
see the Olympic medal history for the country. Bars on the history chart are colored by whether the Olympics
for that year was a home game - home games are gold, other games a black. See if there is a home game advantage!
Process Book
View our process book for creating this site, from the initial questions to our data acquisition and design process.
It also has more information on the pages and visualizations.