We wanted to get into the Olympic spirit, so we started looking for data sources with historical Olympic results and created the Domo Historical Olympic Medal Tracker (below).
While we did do some research around free sources with current Olympic medal data, we felt that Kaggle’s dataset really stood out, with results from Athens 1896 through Rio 2016.
When you leverage the power of the Domo platform, you’re really able to explore some of the medal history.
You can look at raw counts of medals, of course. But to gain a deeper understanding of things, we focused on the number of medals per 1 million residents, as that gives a better comparison between smaller and larger countries.
The big winner of that category is Liechtenstein, with 269.22 medals for every 1 million people. That is a total of 9 medals for just over 33,000 people.
My home country—the United States—has only scored 9.63 medals per million (but it has the No. 1 total count, with more than 2,800 medals won).
What I love about looking at historical data is that it can unveil interesting facts and hidden tidbits of knowledge.
For example, I never knew that they awarded a gold medal in Aeronautics at the 1936 Olympics in Berlin. (No advanced machine learning to find this one; it just popped up in the table of event info below as it is sorted alphabetically.)
While I like the Olympics, my wife loves them. And sometimes when I’m watching the Games with her, I get a little curious and wonder, “Has that country ever won a medal before, and if so, in what events? Also, how big is that country anyway?”
The Domo Historical Olympic Medal Tracker was created to give you answers to those kinds of questions in just a couple of clicks. Filter by country, event or year, and impress your Olympics-watching companion(s).
Have fun, and go Team USA!