Olympics Assignment 6

What characteristics help people in winning an Olympic Medal?

This analysis will use data on Olympic athletes during the 2024 Olympic games to determine what characteristics are helpful in creating an Olympic champion. The data includes various Olympic athletes and only includes the highest medal that they won at the 2024 Paris games. I spent much of the summer watching the Olympic games so I found this topic interesting, and I hope to use it to compare to previous Olympic games in the future.

For now, I will analyze the data that I have managed to scrape from the Olympics.com website specifically for the 2024 Olympics games, and see what results we get. My data set is limited, so the results are not likely valid, but it is a good starting point for once I am able to get more information.

Exploring Gender

Historically, the Olympic games have had more men than women. I wanted to see if this still holds true, even though the Olympics are getting increasingly gender equal. There has been a continuous push to increase equality through methods such as increasing the number of female events to match that of men to increase the number of female athletes. Although they aren’t there yet, they are getting close. I made a bar graph to demonstrate the number of male to female athletes that won an olympic medal. This can help to demonstrate if there are around the same men and women athletes.

The results show that there are actually more men than women in the data set that won an olympic medal, but men are more likely to win gold than women. Women won more Bronze and Silver medals.

Exploring Height

I wanted to see if different heights had a better chance of winning a medal, so I created a box plot on medal and height in inches.

The box plot shows that being taller might help an athlete win a medal. The median for non medalists is the lowest compared to the medalists, with gold and silver medalists being comparable to each other.

Does being tall help you win the games?

I further explored the topic of height by separating athletes into tall and not tall categories. Tall people are over 6 foot while not tall people are under 6 foot. Then, I created a stacked bar chart to demonstrate the proportion of tall people to short people that medaled in this Olympics.

The results that we see, are that Not tall people are less likely to win a medal than Tall people. This makes sense given intuition, that people with taller and athletic builds might be more successful.

Can your last name influence your winning percentage?

Next, I looked at the first letter of people’s last names in the data set to determine if that had any interesting patterns. I took the total number of people with each first letter and compared their winning percentage to the total to find the average winning percentages. Then, I created a bar chart to showcase this information. I also removed any letters that had a 0% winning percentage.

The result is that people with the last name starting with S in this data set, have the highest medal winning percentage compared to the other last names.

Does your age impact whether you win a medal?

To answer this question, I created a box plot to show the distribution of ages depending on the medal type, including non medalists. Non medalists make up a larger portion of this data set, so it could be interesting to see how they compare.

Based on the box plot, we see that the median age of non medalists is lower than that of bronze, silver, and gold medalists. This could mean that having experience through more time in training, or in performing on the Olympic stage could give competitors a leg up on their competition.