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Beijing 2008 Olympics: Medal Count by Country

2745437639_e1f9a494f5_o_dBy seancarmody on Aug 09, 2008
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Chinese Olypmics Website (http://results.beijing2008....)
The Beijing 2008 Summer Olympics began with a many bangs, courtesy of the thousands of drummers in the opening ceremony. Once competition began, a tally of medals won seemed like an obvious data set for Swivel. Since no-one else had embarked on this task, I decided to take it on myself. I included the result in a blog post about Swivel

At first I was typing in the data, but scanning the medal table on the Official Olympics site quickly became a challenge. It was time for an automated solution, so I whipped up a little perl script to scrape the data and I now update the data fairly regularly (not quite real time though).

I am pleased to say that this chart has been something of a runaway success in terms of visitors: at last count views had passed 9500 in two weeks. I attribute this, in part, to Olympics fever but I am sure that it has also been helped by being featured on the popular "Random Thoughts" blog.

There is also an overal medal tally chart based on the same data.

I have now also written about medal counts adjusted for population or gross domestic product (GDP).

seancarmody

Comments (15)

seancarmody says

Posted about this chart (and Swivel in general) over on my blog. Do drop in!

posted 10 months ago

seancarmody says

It's http://stubbornmule.wordpre...

posted 10 months ago

seancarmody says

Total medal count over here: http://www.swivel.com/graph...

posted 10 months ago

seancarmody says

Until I work out a better way to sort on Swivel, this chart is sorted top to bottom in (1) descending order of gold medal count, then (2) reverse alphabetical order by country name.

The data itself is in descending rank order where gold = 3 points, silver = 2 points and bronze = 1 point.

http://www.swivel.com/data_...

posted 10 months ago

selenized says

cool graph

And my home country (Canada) isn't even on there....awww... :-)

posted 10 months ago

seancarmody says

@selenized I'm sure Canada will appear up there soon. I found this which outlines the possible contenders for medals: http://jefflittle.ca/blog/?...

posted 10 months ago

selenized says

Yeah, until the rowing and diving there isn't much hope. Besides Canada always does better in the Winter games anyways.

posted 10 months ago

seancarmody says

To do well at the Winter games, Australia needs the opposition to all fall over each other!

posted 10 months ago

seancarmody says

Canada has medals now!

posted 10 months ago

selenized says

Yay Canada!

posted 10 months ago

seancarmody says

...or should that be "O Canada", eh?

posted 10 months ago

Willdave says

Hi Sean!
Your graph is cool!
I totally agree - sorting is a huge issue with swivel!

Look at this example,
http://www.youcalc.com/puba...
it uses your swivel data set (1016370), but you can actually enter any swivel data ID and run the widget on that.
Or you can create an entirely new widget on your swivel data sets.

Hereby sorting is no longer an issue and the widget can be shared!

Keep up the good work

Will

posted 10 months ago

seancarmody says

@Willdave: looks great! I'll have to have a bit of an explore of youcalc.com

posted 10 months ago

ROBY!!!!! says

GO USA!!!! and Canada and Britain I love em all

posted 8 months ago

sweeppicker says

USA is the best man. We rock!

Adam@Bowflex Ultimate 2.com

posted 21 days ago

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22% Gold and Silver