How do different factors come into play into winning Olympics medals?

Photo by Bryan Turner on Unsplash.

The Olympic Games is a well-known sporting platform which is recognized all over the world, has been distinguished from the late 19th century. Its origin however can be traced back to the Greek empire, at around 3,000 years ago, which consisted only of sprint race, and was held in Greece’s city Olympia only accessible to freeborn Greek people (Young & Abraham, 2020). It has grown since then and now has become a hub for all the athletes worldwide to demonstrate their abilities in more than 28 individual sporting contests. Currently, it is held every 2 years in different countries, with names Summer Olympics and Winter Olympics, both having their own set of games (Young & Abraham, 2020). It has become a place which reflects the power of the individual contestants and has become a source of pride for the countries they represent.

Motivation and Research Questions

Olympics has a rich history, spanning from 1896 till 2018, and has been a part of history. So, it is an interesting topic to see how the historical events have affected the specifics of Olympics and how it has been changing till date. Hence, this report attempts to build around the following questions, with some connection to historical happenings where suitable:

1. What effect does the host country have in the medals won at the Olympics?

2. Is the performance of countries in Olympic games affected by the economic factors of the country?

3. Is the age of winning Olympics changing?

Literature Review

The advantage of host country in any sporting activity is well known, as the participants will have familiarity of the field, and also there is a great support from the home crowd. Host countries are expected to win 3 times the medals that they were winning while playing as away (Clarke, 2000). Being a host nation and also having a communist background is also going to have a positive effect in the number of medals won (Bian, 2005).

It is found that a country’s socio-economic variables, such as GDP affects the country’s performance in the Olympics by a great factor. Country’s population and its GDP is seen to have a correlation with the number of medals won in Olympics (Bian, 2005).

Age factor is also one of the important ones when it comes to sports and even among the athletes of the same age, relative age effect (RAE) comes into factor which determines who triumphs (Fletcher & Sarkar, 2012). RAE states that an athlete can have more advantage as compared to another who is younger by almost a year with respect to maturity, experience and early specialization (Neill, Cotton, Cuadros & Connor, 2016).

Olympics has been a part of the history, and has affected, and also has been affected by the history. Olympic Games has made major social and political impacts throughout the history like including women in sports, has taken a stand against racial matters, promoted civil rights, has unified countries and even has been a tool to demonstrate power by different countries (O’Connell). Similarly, the politics of the countries such as racial separation, terrorism, World Wars and the Cold War have also affected Olympics at different times in the history (Dwyer & McMaster, 2018).

Approach

To answer the questions, three datasets were used namely, “120 years of Olympic history: athletes and results[1]”, “Gapminder GDP per capita, constant PPP dollars- v25[2]” and “Gapminder Total Population v6[3]”. The Olympics dataset had the names of participants, their demographics, which sport they participated in and on which Olympic games. Gapminder’s GDP per capita dataset consisted of GDP of countries from 1960 forecasted till 2040, and their Population dataset had populations of all the countries of the world from 1800 till 2019 and forecasted from there onwards till 2100. A custom dataset was also created that maps the cities mentioned in the Olympics dataset to country names.

Visualizations were created in Tableau and Python. Initial data cleaning was done on Excel, and visualization specific data manipulation were carried out as needed on Tableau and Python.

Findings and Discussion

Host Country Effect

Figure 1 shows the number of times a country has hosted Olympics. The USA has hosted it the most, i.e. 8 times followed by France, which had hosted it 5 times.

Figure 1- Countries that have hosted Olympics, Image by author

Figure 2 shows the total medal winnings of countries that hosted Olympics, and shows that USA has won the most medals, and then it is Germany, followed by France. This hints that the countries which have hosted more Olympics have won more medals. The reasons why the host countries win more medals are due to home field advantage, crowd support and easier qualification criteria, hence more participation (Clarke, 2000).

Figure 2 shows the total medal winnings of countries that hosted Olympics, and shows that USA has won the most medals, and then it is Germany, followed by France. This hints that the countries which have hosted more Olympics have won more medals. The reasons why the host countries win more medals are due to home field advantage, crowd support and easier qualification criteria, hence more participation (Clarke, 2000).

Figure 2- Medals won by Host Countries, Image by author

Now let us see how the number of won medals vary with regards to the host country. Firstly, looking at the USA’s medals won (Figure 3–4), we can see that the number of medals won by it has always increased when it hosted the Olympics. Note the sharp increase in the graph from 1976 till 1984. USA had protested against Russia’s invasion of Afghanistan by boycotting the 1980’s Olympics held in Russia, so the data of that year is not available. And immediately in 1984, Russia boycotted 1984’s Olympics which was held in the USA, thus the USA won more medals.

#data-science #data-visualization #olympics #python #data analysis