Hi, and welcome to my visualization of the history of Olympic participation. This story consists of three scenes, each demonstrating a different fun fact and offering a unique insight into the history of Olympic participation. You can use the navigation buttons at the bottom of the page to navigate between the scenes. Enjoy!
Olympic Participation Trends
Welcome to the first slide! This slide shows the history of the number of participants in each Olympic game. This plot shows that as the Olympic games matured and the number of disciplines increased, the total number of participants also increased. On the plot of the number of participants across all event seasons, the line zigzags after about 1990; this is due to the introduction of the Winter Olympics, which involves much fewer athletes and events than the Summer Olympics. On the dropdown menu on the top left, you can go into detail to independently view the total participation in the Summer and Winter games.
Gender Diversity in the Olympics
This second slide demonstrates the participation numbers of different biological sexes across different sports, with male participants colored in blue and female participants colored in as pink. A noteworthy point in the slide is that you can distinguish from the plot the first Olympic game that allowed women to participate, which was hosted in 1900. Initially, the plot defaults to demonstrating the total number of participants across all sports, and by choosing different drop-down options in the top left corner, specialized graphs of different sports can be seen. As the different plots demonstrate, different sports differ in the level of involvement of females. As different sports were involved in different time frames in history, the x-axis reflects the years when the sport was classified and hosted as an Olympic sport.
Most Popular Sports by Year
2016
This third slide ranks the top five most popular Olympic sports each year; adjusting the slider on the top left corner can change the year plotted. In most years, Athletics clearly dominates the chart as the most popular sport, which is reasonable as it includes many Olympic disciplines like track and field, road running, and race walking. An interesting fact reflected by the chart is that the 1916 Olympics was never held due to World War I. Thus, the chart is empty if 1916 is selected from the slider.