Great visualization of olympic medals won by year

http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2008/08/04/sports/olympics/20080804_MEDALCOUNT_MAP.html

by elsewhen • 18 years ago

55 23 18 years ago

hugh• 18 years ago

That is indeed a great visualisation of some not-very-interesting data.

The only interesting point is the way that the host countries dominated the medal rankings for the first few decades. At the St Louis Olympics practically all the medals were taken home by US-based athletes.

Of course, it is no credit whatsoever to a country to take home medals at the Olympic games. I'm from Australia, a country which punches far above its weight in the Olympic games, but that's only because we have a taxpayer-funded National Institute of Sport to train the athletes (and are, to my understanding, the only non-Communist country to have one).

ChaitanyaSai• 18 years ago

No, there is some interesting data. The geo-politics embedded in it show up really well. East, west germany reunifying, Soviet Union disintegrating, the 1980 Summer Olympics boycott by the Americans, the back-at-you boycott in 84 by the Soviets, and Brazil becoming a force (as their economy strengthened perhaps?). Edit: Also, Japan's absence from the '48 edition after the second world war. Fun going from the map to Wikipedia to find out the reason for some major perturbations.

lbrandy• 18 years ago

Don't forget the original "steroid era". Baseball can't hold a candle to East Germany.

jonmc12• 18 years ago

Yea, its amazing to watch he buildup of Germany and Japan just before WWII.. and the the subsequent re-build.

pchristensen• 18 years ago

the only non-Communist country to have one

Is that why Cuba has so many medals starting in the 60s?

volida• 18 years ago

nice, it would be interesting if i could see it with after-normalization data according to population.

geebee• 18 years ago

That would be very cool. I suspect Australia would top the list.

tlrobinson• 18 years ago

This is a great visualization, I learned a lot about the history of the Olympics just from playing with it for a few minutes.

The first Olympics were held in Greece in 1896. During the first few games the hosting country seemed to have a huge home court advantage, but it stabilized over time.

The 1980 games in Moscow were boycotted by the US and others. The 1984 games in Los Angeles were boycotted by the Soviet Union and others.

In '88 it was called the Soviet Union, in '92 it was the Former Soviet Union, and in '96 it was Russia, Ukraine, etc... I wonder what happened ;)

gojomo• 18 years ago

I knew about the boycotts and the USSR -- but not the large early domination of host country, Sweden's early strong showings, and that as late as 1964 the divided Germanies were still competing as one (which didn't return until 1992).

So a great infographic -- visually interesting and informative.

It would be great to see other statistics animated the same way -- GDP and per capita GDP would be especially interesting, given the last ~30 years of 1.5 billion people moving out of poverty and the rise of China and India.

whatusername• 18 years ago

http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/hans_rosling_shows_the_be...

This shows the GDP stats even better! Well worth watching

jimbokun• 18 years ago

And China seems to appear out of nowhere in 1984. Was that their first year participating?

Chocobean2• 18 years ago

if its not bad form to quote wikipedia, check out http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/People%27s_Republic_of_China where it mentions the fall of the Gang of Four. I think what happened was that China was pretty unstable what with the Wars and then the Communist takeover in 1950, and the Great Leap Forward (exercise in Irony) crippled the country until the economic reforms around the same time as 1984.

markbao• 18 years ago

It would be even more awesome if each circle had a sub-circle to represent gold medals. For example, it's not immediately clear, for instance in 2004 Athens, that US had 102 medals, 36 golds, but although China only had 63 medals it had 32 golds.

Still, very cool. Love seeing the number of medals against time as well.

misterbwong• 18 years ago

I agree. I wanted to see something like this also. Maybe even scaling the size of the bubble using a point system for type of medal.

Hypothetical example, Gold medal = 3pts, Silver = 2pts, Bronze = 1pt. Total the # of points and scale chart accordingly.

ardit33• 18 years ago

well, in many sports, the difference between a gold medalist, and silver one tend to be really minor. So, ability wise, a silver medalist is doing pretty well, and can consider to be a top athlete of the world in that given discipline.

So, maybe a 10 points for a gold, 8, for silver, and 6 for bronze might make more sense.

Formula One used to have this scoring mechanism (which I thought was fair), first 10, second place 8, third 6, then 5, 4, 3, 2, and 1. Usually in a car race there are about 20-22 cars, so only the first 8 cars would get any points.

gukjoon• 18 years ago

Two dimensional objects representing one dimensional data? Tsk tsk.

prospero• 18 years ago

Location isn't one dimensional, and area is the most space-efficient way to represent a scalar value.

jrockway• 18 years ago

When I load it, I get a javascript alert() that says "This page requires AC_RunActiveContent.js." Great work, development team.

VinzO• 18 years ago

I find a bit "strange" to see Portugal in the middle of Europe surrounded by Spain, France , Germany and Switzerland...

fiaz• 18 years ago

Fascinating! It reminds me of cell division shortly after fertilization. I wonder if there is a similar pattern when ideas spread throughout a given population.

Chocobean2• 18 years ago

What happened in 1904 ?? The US bubble says 78Gold, 82Silver and 79Bronze the rest of the world, combining all medals totaled 41. O_o

Any history buffs want to fill me in? (sorry, working. Will make up for it after hours)

riahi• 18 years ago

Very interesting visualization, but you can also see the politics of today. Certain countries are selectively emphasized even though their relative size does not deserve it. In particular, Iran is a labeled circle in 2000 and 2004 when they won maybe 6 medals total.

Great visualization of olympic medals won by year

Related Stories