Every four years we watch the most athletic people of the world compete in different disciplines to see who can win a gold medal at the Olympic Games. Every time it is an exciting and emotional event. But for this project I don’t want to only focus on a single year of Olympics. I want to take a closer look at the overall story and evolution of the event and how different countries have presented themselves and how well they have done. The visualizations has gone through multiple iterations and will finally show the gold medalists in the sport Volleyball from the summer Olympics in 1964 until the Summer Olympics in 2016.
Inspiration for the Visualization
The inspiration for this visualization came from a video seen on youtube. The video shows the borders and population of each country in Europe, for every year since 400 BC.
For each year we can see how the map changes with a change of color and the growing regions. In my case I wanted to simply show the countries of the gold medal winners of each country throughout the Olympic Games.
Materials Used
Carto – Mapping Software
Kaggle – Database for Datasets
Methodology
The original goal of this visualization was to show all olympic winners over the years and how the distribution of medalists has changed throughout time. Unfortunately, Carto did not accept the data set I had in the beginning so I had to go through multiple iterations and cut down my data to the point where I could use it in Carto.
Following is each step of data cuts:
1. All olympic medalists of all sports
2. All olympic medalists of all summer sports
3. All gold medalists of all summer Olympics
4. All gold medalists who play volleyball
5. All gold medalists who play indoor volleyball
After creating the section that I wanted to focus on, which is all gold medalists who play indoor volleyball, I started to import everything into Carto to start understand my data better. I quickly found out that only a few countries had female gold medalists in Volleyball.
After seeing how few countries won gold in Volleyball over the years I decided to show only an over of the map as well as an animation over the years.
Results & Interpretation
The first map created shows all the countries that have won a gold medal in Volleyball at the Olympics from 1964 until 2016. You can immediately see which countries dominate the sport.
The second map is an interactive map. Instead of having an animation, I am displaying all countries that have won and am adding an interactive selection of decades. This way it is possible to see what teams won in which decade.
View the Map here.
Reflection
Overall, it was fascinating to find out how few countries have won Gold in Volleyball at the Olympics over the years. The powerhouses that always win can be seen clearly on the map. As a Volleyball player who follows the sport around the world I had knowledge of the countries that have the best support for Volleyball and I was able to confirm everything I knew by taking a closer look at the data.
Unfortunately, Carto made it impossible to look at a bigger data set and include more sports, like I originally planned in the beginning. The animation that I had planned, that shows each country that won gold by Olympic Year, was also not something I was able to create.