Olympic Winter Games PyeongChang 2018

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):

PyeongChang Winter Olympics 2018 - Medal Maps
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Rio 2016: Medals vs Athletes

Rio Olympics 2016 - Medals vs Athletes Scatterplot
Alternative ways of presenting the results of the Olympics has become more popular in recent years. Google – as other media outlets – did alternative medal counts allowing you to rank the medals not by their absolute numbers, but by other indicators such as population, GDP, or even more quirky themes such as fans or healthy eating. Continue reading

Rio 2016 Olympic Medal Maps

The Rio Olympics, the first on the South American continent, ended after a total of 972 medals were handed out in 306 events. Approximately 11500 athletes competed in 28 sports for a total of 306 gold, 307 silver and 359 bronze medals. The following cartogram series sums up the most successful of all participating countries by resizing each country according to the number of medals going to athletes from there:

Rio Olympics 2016 - Medal Maps
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Rio 2016: Participants and All-Time Medals

Rio 2016, this year’s Summer Olympic Games are about to start. Following the suspension of a large number of Athletes from the Russian team, 11239 athletes are participating in the event, competing for 306 sets of medals. The following map gives an overview of where participants at this year’s event are from, still proving the overall picture of previous games with the wealthy parts of the world dominating the picture, but this year also with a larger number of athletes from South America and especially from Brazil as the host nation. Brazil as the host nations did not have to go through all qualifying rounds and received automatic entry in some disciplines. Also shown in this image is the all-time medal count from all modern Summer Olympics (1896 to 2012) as proportional circles on top of each country:

Rio Olympics 2016 - Map of participants and all-time medals
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Sochi 2014: Paralympic medal maps

Although the 2014 Paralympics started in the middle of the turmoil of the ongoing political crisis in the Ukraine, they went by rather smoothly in the end as most politically controversial tend to do. Putting politics aside, the Russian dominance that already became apparent at the Olympics (see this map) was even greater: The final medal count saw Russia at top of the table with not only the most medals (80), but also most gold (30), silver (28) and bronze (22). Germany came second with 15 medals (9 of them gold), closely followed by Canada with 16 medals (but only 7 gold which put them in third place in the rankings). Second-most medals, however, were won by Ukraine which is an peculiar detail given the current political situation. Britain won the first gold medal ever at the Paralympic winter games, and 19 nations managed to win at least one medal. Here is the Worldmapper-style view of all medals, showing the countries of the world resized according to their total medals won at the 2014 Winter Paralympics (as well as the individual success in each medal category):

Map / Cartogram of the medal distribution at the 2014 Winter Paralympics in Sochi, Russia
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Sochi 2014 Olympic medal maps

The politically controversial 2014 Winter Olympics in Sochi (Russia) are history. What’s left as a legacy beyond the politics is the usual roundup of where the medals went and which nations managed to surprise or disappoint. The final medal count saw Russia being top of the table with not only the most medals (33), but also most gold (11) and silver (11). 26 nations managed to win at least one medal. Here is the Worldmapper-style view of all medals, showing the countries of the world resized according to their total medals won at the 2014 Winter Olympics (as well as the individual success in each medal category):

Map / Cartogram of the medal distribution at the 2014 Winter Olympics in Sochi, Russia
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