Unleashing Olympic Insights: How we visualised the history of the Olympic Games for Paris 2024

Here at Cambridge Kinetics, the excitement is palpable as the Paris Olympics begin and the athletes spring into action. The Olympics is a monumental feat of organisation and logistics, and represents the pinnacle of sporting events worldwide. From keeping track of who’s in the lead in the medal tables (go Team GB!), to coordinating venues, events, attendees, countries, athletes and more – there’s so much to stay on top of.

As avid supporters of Team GB, we’re always keen to explore the statistics about the sports, athletes and events. That’s why we’ve had a bit of fun internally with the Olympics, setting up our very own Kinabase database to help us stay on top of the results, and get those statistics we want to see – showing off the versatility we love to shout about.

James Leung, our intern, set up Kinabase to show off everything from countries, athletes and medal tables for all the historic Olympic summer and winter games.

Exploring the vast dataset of talented athletes, we were able to import data quickly and build powerful dashboards in minutes – discovering some fun facts along the way:

• The USA sends the most athletes, and historically also wins the most medals.
• The average age of Medal Winners is slowly decreasing, even though the average age of Olympic athletes is gradually rising over time!
• On average, roughly three-quarters of all Olympic athletes compete in the Summer Games, with the rest competing in the Winter Games.

Being able to quickly generate charts and reports made it easy to explore the dataset, and it was fun to view the same data through different lenses in a few clicks – by country, by athlete, by sport, by venue and more.

With all the hype, it’s important to remember that running a successful Olympic Games is all possible because of the hard work put in by everyone – from the athletes, to the organisers, to the hundreds of businesses in the supply chain. We know how easy it is for sports events to become messy and disorganised, and just how quickly it can become a whirlwind of emails and spreadsheets – especially when you just want to know who’s doing what, and when.

Sport shares many parallels with the complexities of managing a business, and Kinabase can help supercharge your company no matter the field. Let us remove the barriers, so you and your team can perform at your best.