Visualizing Data from the 2024 Paris Olympics — Part 1

An OlymPIC is worth a thousand visualizations

There’s probably a lot about the 2024 Olympics you didn’t know, such as how old is the oldest competing athlete? Or the youngest? What sports are dominated by different age groups, or genders, or countries? Do certain Zodiac signs have an affinity for different sports?

Maybe you already knew the answer to those questions, but I had no idea. So I downloaded data about the athletes participating in the 2024 Olympics from Kaggle and created the following plots to indulge my curiosity.

Let me share some of my findings with you.

The young ride skateboards. The old ride horses.

If we look at the 20 youngest athletes (ages 11-14) and the 20 oldest athletes (ages 55-69) participating in the 2024 Olympics, we can see that 60% of the youngest athletes compete in skateboarding while 80% of the oldest athletes compete in equestrian events.

The top 20 youngest athletes are participating in sports like skateboarding and swimming. The top 20 oldest athletes are participating in equestrian, table tennis, and shooting.

The youngest Olympic athlete in 2024 was China’s Zheng Haohao, who competed in skateboarding at 11 years old. The oldest Olympic athlete was Australia’s Mary Hanna at 69 years old.

Other sports with older athletes include shooting and table tennis. Sports such as rhythmic gymnastics and freestyle BMX cycling are composed of younger athletes (barely anyone over 30).

The youngest and oldest Olympic athlete per sport, sorted by the age of the youngest athlete. This does not represent the full distribution of ages per sport.

Most countries participate in athletics, swimming, and judo. Few countries participate in water polo and basketball.

Athletics traces its earliest roots to ancient Greek Olympic events. Swimming has been a sport at every modern Summer Olympics. And while Judo has been part of the Summer Olympics since 1964, it still surprised me that so many different countries compete in this sport.

Some sports, such as breakdancing (which is debuting for the first time this year!), hockey, water polo, and basketball, have 16 or fewer countries participating.

Number of unique countries participating in each Olympics athletic discipline.

A few countries send many athletes, while many countries send a few athletes

I sorted countries by the number of athletes it sent to the Olympics. While some countries send hundreds of athletes, there is a long tail of countries that send very few athletes. In fact, four countries (Nauru, Liechtenstein, Somalia, and Belize) only send 1 athlete.

Another way to highlight this disparity is using numbers: 100 countries sent 10 or fewer athletes. This is compared to the only 32 countries that sent 100 or more athletes.

Most countries don’t send that many athletes. A few countries send many athletes, while many countries send a few athletes.

Countries that send 10 or fewer athletes participate in individual combative sports

Countries that send 10 or fewer athletes participate in more individual sports, which might seem obvious. What surprised me was that these sports tended to be combative or martial: judo, shooting, taekwondo, boxing, and wrestling.

Countries that send 100 or more athletes participate in more team sports, such as hockey, rowing, football, handball, and volleyball.

Countries that send 10 or fewer athletes tend to participate in different sports compared to countries that send 100 or more athletes.

Countries that send 10 or fewer athletes send more men than women

For the countries that send 10 or fewer athletes, there are overall more men (56.3%) compared to women (43.7%). This gender skew is obvious when compared to countries that send 100 or more athletes, for which the athletes are at near gender parity.

Countries that send 10 or fewer athletes send more male athletes (56.3%) than female. Countries that send 100 or more athletes are closer to gender parity.

Only female athletes participate in Rhythmic Gymnastics and Artistic Swimming, while wrestling is 67% male

The discipline with the fewest women is Wrestling (32.53%), followed by equestrian and football.

Artistic Swimming and Rhythmic Gymnastics have no male athletes.

All other disciplines are almost at 50/50 gender parity.

Gender distribution of male/female athletes per sport. This figure only shows sports for which the absolute difference of the male/female percentage was greater than 1%.

Less economically developed countries send more male athletes than female athletes

I merged Gross Domestic Product (GDP) data (obtained from the United Nations Statistics Division), used as a proxy for a country’s economic health, with athletes’ country information.

I separated countries into quantiles based on their GDP and showed the median number of athletes sent by countries in those quantiles, disaggregated by gender. There is a trend of less economically developed countries (in the lower 20% quantiles) sending fewer female and more male athletes.

Median number of athletes sent by countries per GPD quantile. The error bars show the interquartile range (25%-75%).

Larger and richer countries send more athletes

While it’s not surprising, it is important sometimes to show what’s clearly in the data — that larger and more economically developed countries do send more athletes. A country has to have both the economic resources and the population to be able to send more athletes to the Olympic games.

As countries have higher GDP or larger population, they send more athletes to the Olympics.

The Pisces are not diving and swimming, but rather playing badminton and rugby

Inspired in part by What Olympic Sport You Could Win Based on Your Zodiac Sign, I showed the proportion of Olympians with each Zodiac sign per sport. Larger circles correspond with a higher percentage of that Zodiac sign within that sport.

Everyone knows Pisces are fish, so the ideal sports for them might be swimming or diving. However, diving is dominated by Virgos, which surprised me, while the Pisces are busy playing badminton and rugby.

The Libras don’t seem to be really good at anything in particular.

I’ll let the astrology nerds dissect this plot further.

But what about the medals? 🏅

In this article, I mainly focused on the athletes participating in the Olympic games.

Don’t worry — I’m already thinking of a Part 2, focusing on the athletes who won medals. What are some questions you’d like to have answered in the data? What else do you want to see? Let me know in the comments!

Citation

For attribution in academic contexts or books, please cite this work as

Yennie Jun, "Visualizing Data from the 2024 Paris Olympics — Part 1", Art Fish Intelligence, 2024.

@article{Jun2024olympicsdataviz,
    author = {Yennie Jun},
    title = {Visualizing Data from the 2024 Paris Olympics — Part 1},
    journal = {Art Fish Intelligence},
    year = {2024},
    howpublished = {\url{https://www.artfish.ai/p/olympics-data-viz}
}