

Great visualization of olympic medals won by year - elsewhen
http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2008/08/04/sports/olympics/20080804_MEDALCOUNT_MAP.html

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tlrobinson
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 ;)

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

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Chocobean
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.

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hugh
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).

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ChaitanyaSai
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.

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

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eru
Don't you like women with beards?

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markbao
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.

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misterbwong
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.

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ardit33
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.

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

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

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riahi
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.

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Chocobean
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)

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fiaz
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.

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

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gukjoon
Two dimensional objects representing one dimensional data? Tsk tsk.

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

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

