Tag: Olympics

  • Olympic Recap/Retro

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    Brendan Barry
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    Every four years (or so) I have to confess that I think fondly back upon my former job, because I worked with a few wonderful colleagues of mine on some data about the Olympics. And the highlight was that we had a model to try and predict the number of medals won by the host…

  • US Olympic Performance

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    Brendan Barry
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    I don’t know if you heard, but the Winter Olympics just concluded. I’m admittedly not a huge fan of the Winter Olympics, but that doesn’t mean I didn’t keep my eye on some of the stories coming out of the coverage. One that I liked was this piece from FiveThirtyEight. It was about halfway through…

  • UK Performance at the Olympics

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    Brendan Barry
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    The Olympics are over and Team GB did rather well, coming in second in the medals table with 27 gold medals, more than they won back in 2012 when they hosted the Olympics. (See my piece four years ago where a colleague of mine and I accurately predicted the UK’s total medal count.) Consequently the…

  • In Putin’s Russia Steroids Dope You

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    Brendan Barry
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    I mean really, given the rampant and pervasive nature of the Russian state-aided doping programme, how could I not use the Russian reversal? Yesterday WADA, the international anti-doping agency, released its findings on Russian doping at the Olympics. And, suffice it to say, the report is rather damning. The BBC published this graphic in an…

  • Speed Skating

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    Brendan Barry
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    Today’s post comes from a co-worker and looks at the increase of speed in speed skating in the Winter Olympics since 1924. It does a nice job of showing the increase in the speed. Because to a degree, the increase has not been linear. Instead, it really only increased in two spurts and recently has…

  • Views on Gay Marriage Around the World

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    Brendan Barry
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    If you have been living under a rock, Sochi, Russia is hosting the winter Olympics this year. A year in which the Russian government passed legislation banning not same-sex relationships but advocacy for said relationships. Several countries, including the United States, take issue with the legislation. But this graphic from the National Journal hints that…

  • Olympic Forecast Comparison

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    Brendan Barry
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    During my research for the Olympic medal projections, I came across a few sites that presented a few other projections because, quite frankly, 65 seemed rather high given that the UK won only 47 the year before. The chart below just compares how the other forecasts turned out in the end. Emily Williams from the…

  • How the UK Got to the 65 Medals We Correctly Predicted

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    Brendan Barry
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    So the Olympics are over. But before they began, I and some co-workers made a prediction about how the United Kingdom and their Team GB would perform. We predicted 65 medals. How did the United Kingdom fare? They won 65 medals. This is a follow-up infographic about what made the United Kingdom a winner at…

  • Olympic-sized Appetites

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    Brendan Barry
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    The Olympics bring out the best. Well, at least in athletics. In terms of infographics, not always so much. This piece from CNN is a fairly unorganised mess with lots of individual datapoints. It’s a shame to see this at CNN when so many other news outlets are doing quality graphic work for the Olympics.

  • Weekend Work

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    Brendan Barry
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    Here’s a rare weekend post to showcase some Olympic-related work. The following graphic looks at how the ranking changes for the Top-10 countries if medals are weighted. To me it is ridiculous that Kazakhstan is ranked higher than Russia because Kazakhstan has won 4 gold medals compared to Russia’s 3 when Kazakhstan has a total…