What Makes An Olympian?

[jordan.zenko]

What makes an Olympian? Is it hardwork, passion, dedication, and an unrelenting work ethic; mixed with a little bit of crazy? Or is it simply luck?

In the spirit of sport, and to commemorate the 2018 Winter Olympics, we've gotten ahold of an Olympic-sized data set, that we're just itching to put in your hands. This data set features over 11,000 athletes from the 2016 Rio De Janeiro games, along with each athlete's nationality, gender, date of birth, height, weight, sport, and medal position.

To download the data set, simply click here.

What we're hoping for, is that you can use Dundas BI to put together a gold-medal winning performance, and discover some really unique insights hiding in the data set. For all we know, the ideal Olympian is 1.91 meters, and has 8 vowels in their name.

To Recap:

1. Use the hyperlinked data set to create a unique visualization
2. I’ll award 300 points for every visualization I receive (take a screen shot and post it below)
3. Include a few sentences, highlighting the conclusions you came to, regardless of how crazy they may seem

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HINT HINT - You're more than welcome to enrich the data with other data sources you connect with!

[david.glickman]

As the medical profession is always going on about BMI and how important it is, and there are many who claim that there it is a meaningless measure, I though I would see if a 'good' BMI equals good olympic performance.

It seems that if you win, which position you get will depend on your BMI, with normal weight being the top scorer. However, it is better to be overweight than under weight.

Suprisingly, there is a higher percentage of the overweight group that win medals than all the other groups.

Of course, different sports favour different body types. Most of the breakdown in the bottom chart is expected, but still interesting. Next thing to do is to break down the chances of winning for each type within each sport.

[devbyrd (Devon Byrd)]

To me the real question was, which zodiac sign has a clear advantage in the Olympic games. Understand this will give an advantage to underground olympic betting circles.

The winner is Taurus, but not by a landslide. I'm curious if a Bull would do as well in a Winter Olympics.

[elia.scher]

I find it interesting that Capricorn is so much behind, while Aquarius and Pisces are not there.

[elia.scher]

Conclusion: table tennis is the optimal sport for maintaining your BMI!

[david.glickman]

Either table tennis or modern pentathlon ;)

[devbyrd (Devon Byrd)]

Ah... I didn't even notice the ones left out. You would think Pisces would at least do well in the summer games! I might expect them to be absent for a Winter analysis.

Also, Libras seem to be a "Go big or Go Home" style Olympian. I think it may be that if they aren't winning Gold, they are thinking about how to get to the pub to socialize or maybe an art gallery.

[devbyrd (Devon Byrd)]

Two polar opposite extremes... interesing. I'll choose table tennis.

[elmar.hulshof]

In addition to the file I have added a bit more data about the population by country to see which country performs the best compared to the number of citizens. In the screenshot on the left are the scores concerning the number of medals for every 1.000.000 citizens (calculation: number of medals / (number of citizens / 1.000.000)) and right the number of medals foreacht country. I was surprised that Fuji would be the best country. United State maybe the country with the most medals but in comparizen to the number of citizens they don't score that good.

Think I am going to create a dashboard to get more insights :-)

[david.glickman]

That is surprising that Fiji is top, and by a long way

[mark.josephson]

Look like if you want to be a medalist you should be born in August in a county that uses the metric system. Also, Myanmar and Liberia are not carrying their weight representing Imperial measurement countries in the medal count.

[jordan.zenko]

Born in a country that uses the Metric system: Check
Born in April (second highest medal count): Check

I'll take my odds in 2020!

[james.davis]

So what I have done here is take the total athletes for each country and how many Gold, Silver, Bronze the got then found the percentage of Athletes form that country that went got a medal.

How does this help figure out what the best Olympian is well not looking at it by country but this approach could be change to look at date of birth for when it would best to be born:

The general idea here is of the total number of athletes in a catagoery to find the percentage that got a medal.

[dave.metza]

I took the 2016 per capita GDP for each country in USD (source: https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/NY.GDP.PCAP.CD) and multiplied it by the number of athletes they sent. Then I totaled up the value of all medals won (based on the estimated market value of the metals from http://coinapps.com/). Using this highly scientific ROI calculation, we can see that Tajikistan was the clear winner of the 2016 Rio Olympics.

[david.glickman]

I love your approach. Forget the sport, the emotion and drama - it all comes down to cold hard cash in the end!

You didn't factor in the cost of the flights though.

[dethie.gning]

1.This report clearly shows that sports requiring more physics are predominantly practiced by men than women.

2.Beautiful view to appreciate the ratios between man and woman by type of practical stport and the performances that go with it.

[sandhya.srinivasan]

My focus is to measure the success KPI and award the popular country and sport

[mohammad.qasim]

I have applied Normal distribution for weights for those who got gold medals, I found that ideal weight was 75 KG.

[jordan.zenko]

Can't argue with numbers - looks like I might need to hit the gym if there's to be a Gold Medal in my future

[luis.silva]