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Visualizing Olympic Sports

Posted In: Sports
Shows All 339 Olympic Sports Organized by Sport

See all 339 Olympic Events in the Tokyo 2020/2021 Olympics

It had always seemed like the most decorated US Olympians tended to be swimmers, so I wanted to see how all the various events are distributed across the different types of sports. Each sport (like swimming) has a number of individual events and are show in a treemap as a collection of boxes. And indeed swimming does have the most individual events of any of the sports in the 2020/2021 Olympics.

I also wanted to see how you can categorize the different Olympic events, so I looked at several different dimensions, which are color coded:

  • Athlete Gender – Events are categorized into Men’s, Women’s, Mixed and Open Events. Mixed is when a specified number of Men and Women are in an event (i.e. one man and one woman) while Open events can be either Men or Women.
  • Team vs Individual – Events are categorized into whether the competitors are individuals or a team (more than one individual)
  • Competition Type – Events are categorized into the type of competition, such as a Race (competitors are performing simultaneously to see who finishes first), Individual (where the competitor performs the event by themselves), Opponent (where the competition is one opponent vs another) or Mixed (where there’s some combination of these types)
  • How winner are Determined – Events are categorized by the type of scoring: Timed (including all races), Judged, Scored (either in ball sports such as soccer or tennis, or in fighting sports like boxing and wrestling), Completion (where each competitor attempts to complete a jump or lift and the winner is the one who can complete the highest level), Distance (jumping and throwing events) and Hybrid (a combination of these types).

The sports with the largest number of individual events is swimming, then track, cycling, and field. Some the fighting sports have many individual events but they are all exclusive categories (i.e. you can’t compete in two different boxing or wrestling events).

Sources and Tools:
I grabbed a list of Olympic sports from Wikipedia and manually coded the information about gender, competition type and other factors. The visualization uses the plotly.js open source graphing library and HTML/CSS/Javascript code for the interactivity and UI.

visualization of olympic events

Speed and Kinetic Energy of Sports Pitches, Shots and Kicks

Posted In: Science | Sports

I’ve been playing (and watching) alot of soccer recently with the kids and it got me thinking about how hard the pros can kick the ball compared to us. This got me thinking about how much energy athletes can impart to a soccer ball and how that compares to balls and projectiles in other sports. This is not a scientific study, as I just googled the fastest pitch, shot, serve, kick, throw etc. from a variety of sports and the weight of the respective balls/projectiles to calculate their kinetic energy and momentum. I added in the stats for a (sort of) human projectile for comparison as well (Usain Bolt).

The graph is color coded so orange refers to projectiles that require no additional equipment, while the blue requires a bat or racket or club to aid in hitting the ball. You can toggle between log and linear scale on the x-axis to better see the differences between different projectiles.

The hammer throw is interesting because it far exceeds the kinetic energy and momentum of the other balls. If you watch a video of olympic hammer throws, you’ll see how much energy these very large, strong athletes are able to put into the throw. I think another aspect is that the top kinetic energy projectiles are all throws where there is significant acceleration of the projectile over a longer period of time rather than an instantaneous kick or hit.

Switching to the speed tab, all of the fastest projectiles are aided by equipment to achieve their very high speeds, but generally these projectiles have lower weights. This is also seen in the momentum tab, where the heavier projectiles are mostly unaided by equipment, probably because of the challenge of imparting enough momentum onto a heavy ball/projectile would require accelerating an even heavier racket/bat.

Equations and stuff

The equation for kinetic energy is \(E = {1\over2} mv^2\),
where E is kinetic energy (expressed in joules or kilojoules), m is mass and v is velocity (or speed).

The equation for momentum is \(P = mv\), where P is momentum.

The difference between momentum and kinetic energy is slightly tricky. The momentum rankings seem to prioritize the mass of the projectile while kinetic energy is a balance between speed (velocity) and mass. In kicking, throwing or hitting a ball/projectile, the player needs to put impart the energy into the ball. In a collision, total momentum of the system (player and ball) is conserved but kinetic energy is not, although total energy is (some energy may be “lost” as heat, sound, etc). In terms of being “hit” by the projectile, I believe that kinetic energy is probably more important than momentum for gauging the overall effect of the impact, but the total energy is not the only concern.The area over which the impact would occur is also important. Honestly, the table tennis (ping-pong) ball is the only one I think I’d be okay getting hit by (at least at these world record speeds).

Data sources and tools:
Mostly google for ball weights and trying to find some mention of the “fastest” throw or kick or whatever. Calculations are made using the equations above and plotted using Plot.ly javascript library.

March Madness Bracket Picker Based on Historical Probabilities (and Monte Carlo Simulation)

Posted In: Sports


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March Madness Matchup Visualizer

Posted In: Sports

It’s March and for those who follow sports, that means college basketball and March Madness.  The tournament is mainly interesting because of two reasons: (1) filling out brackets and (2) watching and hoping for upsets .  This interactive March Madness matchup visualizer helps do both of these things by showing you the history of the tournament (since 1985 when the tournament expanded to 64 teams) in terms of matchups between teams with different seeds (1 through 16 in four regions).
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