6 The modern Olympic Games in numbers
“Faster, Higher, Stronger”
Background The modern Olympic Games have taken place every four years for over 120 years—barring the years of the two World Wars. They started small in 1896 in Athens and have expanded enormously to become one of the biggest global events.
Questions How many Olympic events have there been? Which events have taken place at many Games and which rarely? How have performances improved over the years? How have the numbers of countries and participants developed?
Sources Two datasets scraped from websites reporting Olympic results, one from a private source and one from Kaggle (Griffin (2019)).
Structure One dataset included 108789 competitors, reporting whether they won medals or not and, where available, their performance, just for Summer Olympics. The other dataset included all 222522 competitors with medals, age, height, weight and sex, but not performance data, and covered Summer and Winter Olympics.