The Olympic Medals Map

In the past seven days you've almost definitely seen numerous tables of Olympic medal winners. Now it is time to view the map.

Giorgio Comai creates interactive maps of Olympic Medal winners based on which NUTS region they were born in. This means that you can look past the traditional country led rankings used in most Olympic medal tables to explore the medals won by different regions. Alternatively you can just use the map to discover which Olympic medal winner was born closest to your address.

The 2024 Olympic Medalists Map is plotting the birthplaces of the Paris Olympic medal winners as the data becomes available on Wikipedia. On viewing the map my first thought was 'Oh, this is a population density map' but there are clearly some countries with high population densities (eg India) which don't have many medal winners. So my second thought was that the Olympics medal map more closely resembles a map of global inequality.

World Bank map of poverty headcounts

Giorgio Comai's Github page, Olympics medalists, not by country, but by NUTS region, has links to birthplace maps of Olympic medal winners for every Olympics since 1948. The page also includes links to the Wikipedia lists of all the medal winners in each Olympics since 1896 (the source data used in Giorgio's maps).