Summer Olympic Medals 1896-present
by Bill McKeeman August 17, 2008
Various looks at the medal counts of the Summer Olympics
Contents
How it works
The olympic medal records are recorded in scripts summerYYYY.m. Another script, allSummers, places values in the workspace
- medals(i,j) is a record of medals for team i in olympiad j
- hosts(j) is the name of the host nation of olympiad j
- sites(j) is the name of the host city of olympiad j
- teamobj give the correlation between team i and its text name
allSummers % set up data
Varieties of analysis
There are many questions of interest, depending somewhat on who you are and where you come from. I have coded up a few as examples. I presume that you, the user, will code up your own. Here is where the olympics have been or were planned to be (some were cancelled; some were boycotted.).
listSites(hosts, sites)
1896 Athens, Greece 1900 Paris, France 1904 St. Louis, United States 1908 London, Great Britain 1912 Stockholm, Sweden 1916 Berlin, Germany 1920 Antwerp, Belgium 1924 Paris, France 1928 Amsterdam, Netherlands 1932 Los Angeles, United States 1936 Berlin, Germany 1940 Tokyo, Japan 1944 London, Great Britain 1948 London, Great Britain 1952 Helsinki, Finland 1956 Melbourne, Australia 1960 Rome, Italy 1964 Tokyo, Japan 1968 Mexico City, Mexico 1972 Munich, West Germany 1976 Montreal, Canada 1980 Moscow, Soviet Union 1984 Los Angeles, United States 1988 Seoul, South Korea 1992 Barcelona, Spain 1996 Atlanta, United States 2000 Sydney, Australia 2004 Athens, Greece 2008 Beijing, China
The number of medals
As it happens, the number of sporting events and therefore the number of medals has been increasing over time. Did you know that Tug Of War was once an olympic sport? Here is the plot.
plotTotalMedals(medals);
Comparing records
Comparing the records of traditional rivals, say France and Great Britain, over time is sometimes interesting. Here is a comparison of totals medals in each Olympiad for the United States, China, Russia and the Soviet Union:
plotCountryMedals(medals, teamobj, ... {'China', 'Soviet Union', 'Unified Team', 'Russia', 'United States'});
Ranking
The team ranks can be computed for the entire set of medal winning teams. One ranking is based on gold first, silver second, then bronze. Another is on total medals. Here are these rankings:
rank1 = rankGSB(medals); listRanks(rank1, teamobj, games(1900));
Olympiad II 1 France 2 United States 3 Great Britain 4 Mixed team 5 Switzerland 6 Belgium 7 Germany 8 Italy 9 Australia 10 Denmark 11 Hungary 12 Cuba 13 Canada 14 Spain 15 Austria 16 Norway 17 India 18 Netherlands 19 Bohemia 20 Mexico 20 Sweden
rank2 = rankTotalMedals(medals); listRanks(rank2, teamobj, games(1900));
Olympiad II 1 France 2 United States 3 Great Britain 4 Belgium 5 Mixed team 6 Switzerland 7 Germany 8 Austria 8 Denmark 10 Hungary 10 Australia 10 Norway 13 Italy 13 Netherlands 15 Cuba 15 Canada 15 India 15 Bohemia 19 Spain 19 Mexico 19 Sweden
Final comments
The data in each file summerYYYY.m is hand-transcribed from wikipedia. There could be errors. I will, of course, correct errors that are brought to my attention.
Related Sites
Graphics of country versus gold medals over time http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2008/08/17/sports/olympics/20080817-goldmedals-graphic.html?th&emc=th
Sports Illustrated Bar Graph of Medals/Olympiad http://sportsillustrated.cnn.com/olympics/2008/medals/historic/1904.html