How can athletes have the advantage over their competitors?
The Olympics is an event where the world's top athlethes gather to compete. Even though these athlethes are the absolute best in the world, certain participants have a number of different advantages over others which allow them to be victorious. The visualisations below show some of the ways athletes are superior over others.
Advantage of the country of origin
Even though athletes cannot determine where they are born, this has a big influence on their abilities for certain sports. Sometimes this comes down to genetics, and sometimes this simply comes down to the popularity of a sport in a certain country. South Korea dominates archery, China has more tennis table player than any other nation and for swimming we immediately think of the American Michael Phelps.
In this chart we try to show this using a world map. After selecting a sport, medal type and data representation, the opacity of a certain country represents their performance at this sport.
Weight, height and age advantage
Athletes that participate in the Olympics spend years preparing for the event. They strive to get in peak physical shape and this is clearly visible in the data.
This chart visualizes the distribution of certain physical properties of the athletes for each sport. The horizontal position of the bubble is equal to the value the bubble represents, the area of the bubble is scaled linearly with the amount of athletes that possess this particular value of the property. For example, looking at Judo we clearly see a number of distinct large bubbles, these bubbles correspond to the different weight classifications for the sport.
Advantage of the hosting country
The Summer Olympics is one of, if not the biggest event in the world. Even though hosting the games is very expensive, it comes with a lot of prestige and status. It is a way for a country to show off and gain reputation. Besides this esteem, hosting the games also gives a big advantage to the athletes competing for the hosting country.
The bar charts below are a demonstration of this advantage. They visualise the amount of medals, the amount of medals per athlete and the amount of athletes for each country that hosted the Games at least once. The year in which they hosted the games is indicated in red. This red bar is almost always a huge peak compared to the blue bars, proving there is an clear advantage when hosting the Games.