The 2018 Winter Olympic Games in PyeongChang have come to an end. Branded as the ‘Games of new horizons’, they were as much about politics as they were about actual sports. The following cartogram series focuses on the sports side of the games, showing the distribution of medals that were awarded during the games. The maps show each country resized according to the number of medals received by each country (with the Olympic Athlete from Russia shown as Russia):
Olympic games are still an event that is largely influenced by wealth of participating nations. As the following cartogram of the number of participants shows, the most affluent countries are those that send most athletes to the games – with a slight bias towards classic ‘winter sports’-countries (when comparing this picture to participants as the last Summer Olympics):
As the above map already indicates, the number of athletes participating at the games has an influence on the number of medals won, even if there are exceptions. Sometimes a graph can be better to show such correlations. The following scatter plot gives the diagram perspective on the numbers from the cartogram above by plotting the number of medals won at the 2018 Winter Olympics versus the number of athletes (for the stats geeks, the linear regression results in a r² value of 0.5406):
Those were the 2018 Winter Olympics.
Beijing 2022 is next (or Tokyo for the 2020 summer games).
The content on this page has been created by Benjamin Hennig using data by the PyeongChang 2018 Organising Committee. Please contact me for further details and the terms of use.