Thursday, August 4, 2016

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 5th 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. 




1 comment: