An Analysis of the Summer Olympics
Sujana Oruganti
Originated in the ancient Greece, the Olympic festival was revived in the 19th century. The ancient Olympic Games included as many as 32 different sports that are now part of the contemporary Summer Olympics. The Olympic Games have come to be regarded as the world’s foremost sports competition. The prestigious sports competitions are organized by the International Olympic Committee (IOC). “The honour of holding the Olympic Games is entrusted to a city, not to a country. The choice of the city lies solely with the IOC” [1].
As of today, we have the biennial Olympic Games alternated by the Summer and Winter Olympic Games. In this article, an analysis on the performance of different countries in different sports was conducted by visualizing the dataset on Kaggle. Now, for the analysis only the data on the Summer Olympics was used because there was more data available compared to the Winter Olympics. Firstly, let us look at the number of total medals won by each country in the interactive plot below before looking at the top countries:
Source:Kaggle
What are the top countries that won most medals in the history?
The first Modern Olympic games were started in the year 1896 in Athens, Greece with athletes only from 12 countries. And, since then the summer Olympics Games were held for more than 25 times and the athletes from each country have increased in addition to the participating countries. As more countries participated, the competition among the athletes has drastically increased. The competition increased to a point where winning the Olympic Games became a national pride. As a result, the number of medals won each year from 1896 to 2012 is increasing. 
Source:Kaggle
Among all the countries across the world, the USA, URS (Soviet Union), UK, France and Germany are the top five countries to win the most medals (Gold, Silver, Bronze) since 1896 in Summer Olympic Games. The top 5 countries listed here were powerful and more advanced than other countries during the first half of the 20th century. This means the athletes from these countries must have had better training facilities enabling them to perform well in their sports events. This enabled them to have an upper hand early on which could be one of the reasons as to why the 5 countries are ranked top. Additionally, the countries hosting the Olympics could have an advantage over other countries’ athletes.
It is said that “the host country typically has an advantage – they’ll win about 2 percent more medals just for having the games on their turf. Reasons for this benefit include reduced travel costs, hometown enthusiasm and venues that cater more specifically to their athletes’ needs” [2]. And, looking at the venues of the Olympics, USA hosted for four times, UK hosted three times in London and the countries France and Germany each hosted twice. These could be some of the reasons why these countries ranked top 5 in the analysis. The following is an interactive dygraph that shows the medals won by the top five countries since 1896:
Which sports are winning?
Using the dataset, an analysis was performed to see which sports are winning the most medals depending on the past performance of the athletes in different sports and in different events. Based on the analysis, Aquatics is the sport to win the highest medals with 4170 including gold, silver and bronze. Followed by Aquatics are the sports Athletics (3638), Rowing (2667), Gymnastics (2307), Fencing (1613). To get more medals, countries should probably have athletes in the least winning sports (the sports to win less medals in the past) because the competition might be less compared to the most winning sports. The graph below shows how profitable each of the following sports are.
Does population affect the medals won?
As the advent of science and technology increased in our daily lives, the human life expectancy is also increasing Medical Daily. And, as a result the world population is growing. But does the increase in population affect the medals won by each country in the Olympics? Maybe. The graph below shows how the population of all the countries ever participated in Olympics has affected their winning.
The graph above says that smaller the population, the smaller the number of medals. However, there are three outliers - USA, India and China (from left to right) - in the data that tell a different story. It is probably because the USA won the highest number of medals than any other country ever did. Furthermore, India and China are the world’s most populous countries. So, another analysis was performed using the logarithmic values of the Population and Medals won to visualize the data on a rescaled axis. From the graph below, it can be said that there exists some positive correlation between the Population versus the medals won by the countries.
How about GDP?
Since population as a characteristic gave us a perspective on the number of medals won, let us now look at the GDP per capita of each country. “The GDP Per capita is a measure of a country’s economic output that accounts for its number of people. It divides the country’s gross domestic product by its total population. That makes it the best measurement of a country’s standard of living” (The Balance). The graph below shows that the correlation between the GDP Per Capita of a country and the medals won by that country is not very high. Like the Population graph above, the axes were rescaled using the logarithmic values and the results are shown in the second graph below.
Graph of rescaled axes (with logarithm):
The graph with the rescaled axes shows a better correlation with the GDP per capita and the medals won. Additionally, there are several other factors that contribute to winning most medals in Olympic Games like some countries invest in sports and encourage the athletes by supporting them financially despite having a low GDP per Capita. On the other hand, some countries may not support its athletes as much as the other countries do.
I hope this post aids in understanding the performance of different countries in the Olympic Games over the years.
Dataset:
The datasets used in this article is on Olympics available on the Kaggle Website: Olympic Sports and Medals, 1896-2014. The dataset has information in three different CSV files - dictionary.csv, winter.csv, summer.csv. The first file, dictionary.csv, has the information about the country name, IOC code, population and the GDP of the country. In the summer.csv, information about the Summer Olympics is listed with the year, city, sport, discipline, athlete, country of the athlete, gender, event and the medal won. Lastly, the winter.csv file has the same information as the summer.csv except that it is the information from the Summer Games. Now, for the data analysis, I chose to work on Summer Olympic games dataset, because there is more data available in the Summer Olympics compared to data in the winter.csv file.
References
[1] D. C. Young and H. M. Abrahams, “Olympic Games,” 02 Feb 2018. [Online]. Available: https://www.britannica.com/sports/Olympic-Games.
[2] J. Toothman, “Why do some countries seem to dominate the Olympics?,” [Online]. Available: https://entertainment.howstuffworks.com/countries-dominate-olympics1.htm.