Charting Olympic medal hauls

As promised in the last post, I’ve been doing up a little chart of medal counts at the Winter Olympics. All of ‘em (though not all the teams). And here it is (click on it to see a bigger version):

This was fun to do. There have probably already been any number of approaches to charting this kind of information over the years, but I found this worthwhile anyway, if only for a practice exercise.

Obviously this is a very limited subset of the relevant data; in approaching this idea, there were simply so many variables I don’t think one could effectively represent all of them in any one design, even if it’s some sort of hypothetical chart in three dimensions that can then transform to represent a fourth dimension. (Though an attempt at such a thing would probably be really cool.)

For comprehensive data on this particular subject, there may really be nothing better than simple charts of numbers. Of course, I wanted to do some sort of visual presentation, and decided on a line graph, which immediately meant limiting the number of nations represented, among other things. No offense to those teams left out, particularly given the Eurocentric content I ended up with. (I imagine that in as little as four years’ time, the Chinese team may notch up a medal count which will simply demand inclusion, but for now these are the teams I went with.) I actually had an eighth team, but it simply made things too busy.

I also went with total number of medals, of course, so in this chart a bronze medal “counts” for the same as a gold. As I’ve noted in past discussions on information design, one is forced to make choices about what to show and what to leave out.

I think the result is still interesting. One simplification that I made may actually show more: over time, new events have obviously led to “medal inflation.” I could, in theory, have created “inflation adjusted” numbers so that the chart tracked a country’s proportionate medal haul for any given games. But the real totals are still information, and would have been left out by such an approach; as is I think one can clearly observe the larger totals over time and put them into context without the chart doing so itself.

Some other notes: a couple of game years were skipped of course, due to a little thing called World War II. I didn’t bother trying to reflect this on the chart. Germany had split teams for most (thought not all) of the cold war years, but I’ve simply depicted combined totals here. The Soviet Union, the modern Russia and the 1992-only “Unified Team” are likewise a single line, though in this case I’ve noted the changeovers.

Data, as noted, was taken from the Sports Illustrated web site; any errors are probably my own.

Finally, man, the Russians and Germans were really in a league of their own during the ’70s and ’80s, weren’t they?