Citius, Altius, Dorkius

I always feel ambivalent about the Olympic Games. Though once an exaltation of individual achievement, today’s games are a spectacle of mindless patriotism. Nations march in the opening ceremonies. National flags are plastered on every athlete. National anthems grace every medal ceremony. But individuals compete. Sure, it’s fun to root for the USA, but it’s hard to see how something like Michael Phelps’ streak of record-breaking races is any sort of national accomplishment. It’s a victory for Phelps, for his team and his trainers, but I sure didn’t sacrifice much on behalf of my country to help him win eight gold medals.

Yet, at every Olympics, the boosterism continues, with the total medal count the favored indicator of national greatness. This year, of course, it is a portent of our geopolitical future: today the Chinese win the Olympics, tomorrow they win the world economy!

On the other hand, incredible human achievements still lie beneath the shlocky crust of national pride. Plus, this year’s games brought our increasingly irrelevant and oddly endearing President out in force, which more than makes up for all the spectators wearing goofy Uncle Sam hats.

Most important, although the medal count ought to be an irrelevant indicator, it’s not. The modern Olympics have always been political, and so has the medal count. That makes it a fun statistic to slice and dice. The New York Times did so recently with a neat medal-count cartogram, and the BBC recalculated the rankings based on things like population and GDP.

Interesting — but not quite geeky enough for me. So, with the help of Google Docs, I cooked up a gapminder animated chart comparing medal count numbers to some of the World Bank’s development indicators. Check it out below (you’ll have to click through).

The dataset is available here, and a lighter, embedded chart is available here (no thanks to WordPress!). Medal count data was imported from an Excel spreadsheet prepared by Chandoo, who graciously copy-pasted every medal count since 1896 from the IOC website and posted the data on his blog. Other indicators were imported from a World Bank DDP query. The 2008 medal count came from the official website around 10pm EST last night, so it’s already changed a bit.

Bear a few things in mind when using the chart. First, World Bank data is unavailable before 1960, so development indicators can only be compared to medal counts for recent Olympic games. However, data on medal counts (that includes the total number of medals awarded at the Olympics, the number of medals awarded to each country, and the “medal share,” or percent of all medals won by each country) goes back all the way to 1896, so these data can be compared before 1960.

Second, the Olympics are held every four years, but development indicators are included for every year. The chart extrapolates medal counts in non-Olympics years, so if you care about accuracy, check out the dataset for exact values, or make sure you’ve scrolled the time slider to an Olympic year (for an example of this, check out the U.S. medal count between 1903 and 1905, graphed against the year).

Finally, any errors in the data are my own, and likely the result of furious copy-pasting between various sources. I’ve checked it as best I can, but if you see something crazy, let me know, and I’ll do my best to fix it. Enjoy!