Where Are the Winners? Spatial Patterns of Olympics Medals of Rio 2016 Olympics!

I was not sure whether I would make maps showing medals won by different countries in Rio Olympics 2016 or not. But, I was still free to watch Bollywood movies and work with GIS on the side. My favorite pastime? Yes ! I love doing it and it has been my favorite way of Worktainment. Did I just invent the new word? No, I didn't. Apparently, there is already a website with this name- http://worktainment.com/. Poor me- why people invent words ahead of me? Hahaha!

Let's come to the medal map preparation process. I had a basic framework ready from the work I did for last blog post.Wikipedia also has a table of data showing medals won by different countries in tabulated format. I just had to copy and paste data in excel sheet. Wikipedia also has all the maps prepared, though.

There was an issue with the table I created from the information I copied from Wikipedia. I tried for three hours to join medals table with country shapefile in GIS.  I kept getting null values every time I try. I went through every country names-no issues there. I figured out there were extra spaces after the word in the excel cells. I fixed that- still no solutions. I accidentally figured out the solution. Apparently, there were extra spaces in front of the country name which were the main culprits. I only had 87 countries on the list so it only took me few minutes to go to individual cells and remove extra spaces. Finally, I made these few maps.

Maps are worth thousands of words. I just want to say few words- There were many athletes which didn't belong to any country boundary on the map. They played as a refugee team and an independent athlete team dubbed the Independent Olympic Athlete (IOA) in Rio Olympics. They won two medals; one gold and one bronze. Bravo!!

Total Medals Won by Different Countries

Gold Medals Won by Different Countries

Silver Medals Won by Different Countries

Bronze Medals Won by Different Countries

You, Me and Rio 2016 Olympics!

What do you call this- a vacation time? A crucial work time between an end of masters and start of PhD? I have to work to finish leftover from my master's degree and also prepare for the new degree, and a new move. You know, I told my new adviser that I would come up with the research idea that I am going to work as a PhD student.  

No, I am not working on my proposal!

Three days ago, I opened Facebook and it reminded me of the Olympic game that is going to be inaugurated in Brazil!  On Friday, the 5^th of August there will be a grand opening ceremony of the biggest sporting event of the world in Rio de Janeiro, the capital city of Brazil.

One idea popped up in my head! The Olympics is a global phenomenon. I used to follow it with great passion in the past. Why don't I make maps showing the numbers of athletes in each country or the numbers of sports they are participating? Until yesterday there were not any such maps available on the web. But today I found one in Wikipedia. I am making one by myself anyway.

But I didn't find the data of the numbers of athletes and sports they are participating in a tabular format. I had to manually find it on the web and enter in the excel sheet. It took two days to manually collect and enter into excel sheet for this lazy ass and another one day to prepare the maps, of course using ArcMap.

Here you go! 

Number of athletes by country

Number of sports participated by country

The number of athletes and sports data from the official website of Rio Olympics (https://www.rio2016.com/en/sports)

One pattern is really prevalent in these maps, rich  countries have a larger number of athletes and sports participation. Although smaller in size, the majority of European countries have better representation in Olympics. As we can see from the maps that most of the South Asian and African countries have poor representation in Olympics.

It's your turn now. See, understand or forget!

I can't guarantee that I will make maps with medals won by each country after the end of this Olympics.