Tag Archives: Olympics

Olympic trivia: live pigeon shooting, youngest athlete, theoretical limit to running, 100+ year gold medal count

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In the spirit of the Olympics, four graphs courtesy of the Economist blog.

1.The types of Olympic games have changed over the years.  The Olympics had 26 events in London, but that has not always been the case.  As recently as Beijing 2008, there were 28 events.  Well what are some of the events that went away?

  • Rope climbing seems like a simple and difficult sport.  Climbing a 20 or 25 foot rope with just your hands.  It appeared sporadically 4 times over 40 years
  • Live pigeon shooting in the 1900 Paris Olympics.  History.com notes that this went away after some spectators were horrified by the gore and cried
  • Tug-of-war existing between 1900 and 1920.  8 men on each side

Discontinued Olympic Sports

2. Olympians vary in age from 10 to 70 years old.  Seems like shooting and equestrian are good choices for the geriatric.  The younger athletes do better in swimming and gymnastics.  I guess we shouldn’t let 13 year-olds play with guns anyway.Oldest Olympic Athletes3. Olympians keep getting faster.  Dr. Mark Denny, from Stanford, has calculated the theoretical limit to how fast men and women can run (for the geeks: looking at the maximum standard deviation from the mean), and Olympians are rapidly approaching that limit.  That probably means that fewer records will be broken in the future.  Usain Bolt is crazy fast.

Fast Olympic Runner4. The US has done well at sports for 100 years.  In a different post, I showed that there are many ways to measure Olympic medals (e.g., medals per population, medals per GDP, medals per athlete).   That said, the most popular metric is the total number of gold medals.  Below, you can see who won the most gold by event over the last 100+ years

  • The US won the majority of golds in track/field (35%), diving (46%), swimming (50%)
  •  The Soviet Union won the majority of the golds in gymnastics (21%) and weight lifting (21%), and wrestling (16%).  Can you imagine if they kept winning after 1989?
  • Overall, the US has won 22% of the golds across all sports

Most Winning Country

Olympic Medals Measured by Population, By Productivity, By GDP

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As a consultant, it always seemed odd that news reporters routinely compare the medal count between the USA and China – after all, the USA has 530 athletes compared to China’s 380.  Seems like the total number of medals is only one of many potential metrics.  For example, productivity (i.e., # of athletes needed to win a medal) would be a metric that levels the playing field among countries of different sizes.  Thinking along those lines, I smashed together data of the last 40 years and came up with this:

If you’re from Iceland, there is a good chance you are an Olympic Athlete. . .

Most selective Olympic team

In 2010, there were 319K people in Iceland and yet they sent 27 people to London for the Olympics.  Simple math tells us that they sent 1 athlete for every 11K people.  In fact, it is really easy to be an Icelandic Olympic athlete compared to the Bangladeshi.

I took the country’s 2010 population here and divided it by the number of athletes that each country sent to the London Olympics.   You can see that China sent 1 athlete to the Olympics for every 3.5M citizens.  The US sends 1 athlete for every 580K citizens.  It is easier to go to the Olympics as an American than a Chinese – less selective.

Olympics by Population 1972-2008If you are from Bangladesh, your chances of going to the Olympics as an athlete are slim.  Only 1 in 30 million Bangladeshi go to compete in the Olympics.  As a thought-experiment, if all the teams sent 1 athlete for every 30M people . . .

  • The US Olympic team would only send 10 people (not 580)
  • The total Olympics would only be 233 Athletes (not the 10,700+ it currently is)
  • Only 40 countries (over 30M population) would be competing

The most productive Olympic athletes are from . . . . Panama

Athlete productivity

Why does data surprise us?  Looking at all the medals won in 2008, and then dividing it by the number of athletes sent to Beijing by country, Panama wins the prize for the most productive athletes.   Panama will win 1 medal (over average) for every 3 athletes they send to the Olympics.  It is correlation, not causality – but it is still impressive.

Olympics Medals

  • South Africa won 1 medal in 2008 with 136 athletes
  • Burkina Faso also won 1 medal in 2008, with only 6 athletes

Of all the medals that China wins, more than 50% are gold

Gold as a percentage of medals

In a previous post, I discovered that only 32% of medals are gold (more than 36% are bronze).  When analyzing the medals over the last 40 years, the Chinese have stood out as a strong bunch.  51% of their medals are gold vs. 32% of US medals being gold.

Olympic Gold %

In terms of the GDP per athlete, the Indonesia was the highest

GDP per Athlete flag

Looking at the country-based GDP numbers here, Indonesia has $32B in GDP (2010) for every athlete sent to London 2012.  By comparison, every Tuvalu athlete symbolizes only $10M in GDP output.  Likewise, the US Olympic athlete symbolizes $27B in output compared to $4B represented by the British athlete.

GDP per Athlete

China keeps winning. . .

Looking at the current medal leaders in London, you can see that the United States (in white) has been consistently winning ~ 100 medals every summer Olympics except in the 1980 Olympics where there was a boycott.   The British  (in blue) have done well since 2000, but the Chinese are the stand outs.  They had no Olympic team in 1980, yet they had 100 medals in 2008.

Summer Olympic Medals US China UK

I am a patriotic American.  Huge believer in US constitution, freedom of speech, Chik-Fil-A sandwiches, our top-shelf graduate education system, Pixar movies, micro-brews, Teddy Roosevelt, National parks and NPR.  (Yes, I do wish the Economist was a US paper).  Love watching the women’s soccer (not football) team beat the Japanese, and the women’s volleyball finals US vs. US.  Michael Phelps is impressive too.

That said, we also need to give credit where credit is due.  The Chinese have been rocking the Olympics.  A balanced scored card of the Olympics might look like this.

Scorecard US China UK

China won 100 medals in 2008 summer Olympics which was a 59% increase over 2004.  Each Chinese athlete has a 1 in 3.5 million chance of making the team, but when they get to the Olympics ~ it takes 6.4 athletes to win a medal, and 51% of the time it is gold.

The Olympics are awesome to watch and one of the most democratic sporting events, if you are willing to measure medal counts a little bit differently.  Enjoy the games.  Go USA.

Note: The Huffington Post has also done an excellent job with this line of thinking – alternate ways to count medals.  Look here.

A consultant’s view of 40 Years of Olympics Data (1972-2008)

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Olympic RingsThe Olympics are a wonder.  At a macro-level, it is a family get-together of 200+ nations where all the international relations and the geopolitical clatter is replaced with sports.  It’s a rare opportunity where xenophobia, racial stereotypes, and hatred are not accepted.  At an individual level, it is hundreds of individual stories of ambition, sacrifice, and passion.

The Olympics have been around for a long time and who does not like Olympic sports stats? Looking back over the last 10 summer Olympics, a few things you notice:

There is medal inflation. . . Forty years ago, there were  600 medals awarded at the summer Olympics.  In 2008, 951 medals were awarded.  This increase is largely because of the increase in the number of events from 21 (1972) to 28 (2008).  Apparently, 2012 London does not have baseball and softball, so the number drops to 26 sports, only to go back up to 28 in the next Olympics with the addition of Golf and Rugby.

40 years of Olympic Medals

. . but it’s still damn hard to get a medal.  Yes, the number of medals went up, but so did the numbers of athletes.  Over the last forty years there have been  ~ 7,700 medals awarded and approximately 85,500 athletes.  Using a simple average, that comes to about 9% of the athletes getting medals. For the math types, that 9% is approximate because some athletes win more than 1 medal (e.g., Micheal Phelps) and some events award medals to the entire team (e.g., 1 gold medal for football, but it goes to 11+ players).  On the graph below, you can see that the 1980 and 1984 Olympics were outliers because of cold-war related boycotts.  In 1980 and 1984, there were fewer athletes, so the chances of actually winning a medal increased dramatically.

% of Olympic Medals

Lots of bronze medals: I thought that there was 1 gold, 1 silver and 1 bronze per event, but that is not what the data said.  After a friend explained why, now I know that some events like judo, taekwondo and wrestling have 2 bronzes medals.

Bronze Medals as a % of TotalMore countries are winning medals. . . In 2008, there were 86 counties that won at least 1 medal during the summer Olympics,  broader participation than ever.

Number of Countries Winning Medals. . . a lot of them are former Soviet Republics.  In 1992, Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania win medals.  Then in 1996, Armenia, Azerbaijan, Belarus, Georgia and others join in. Summer Medals from Former Soviet Republics

One commenter asked: What is the US vs. USSR medal counts (including Post-Soviet Republics)?

Well, it looks like the USSR & Post-Soviet Republics are really great competitors.  Their medal counts were higher than the US in 8 of the 8 years when there were not boycotts.

US vs USSR and Post Soviet

The 80/20 Rule applies: Over the last 40 years, 129 countries have won Olympic medals.  However, 23 of those countries have captured 80% of the cumulative medals.

Summer Olympics Medals Cumulative Total by CountryMighty East Germans: The East Germans’ Olympic medal count remains the 4th highest in the list of 129 countries with medals.  This struck me as particularly impressive since the Berlin wall fell in 1989.  They won all 384 medals between 1972-1988.East and West Germany Olympics

They New York Times does great work with visualization.  This bubble chart of Olympic Medals by countries is no exception.  You can see by screenshot how big the East German bubble is in 1988.  Click on the link and enjoy this graph with a slider on it.

Olympics Medals

Source: Olympic rings photo, Flickr, spcbrass