With the Rio Olympics Games being just around the corner, it’s time for us sport-crazed, data lovers to get our geek on! Want to know something about the 2016 Olympic Games? Chances are we’ll have a statistic for you here, so without further ado:
Rio 2016
This is the first time in history that the Summer Olympics have been hosted by a city in South America, although North America has hosted six games. Now, the only continent (bar Antarctica) to have not hosted an Olympics is Africa. Europe has seen the most Games, with 16 since 1896, followed by North America with 6, Asia with 3 and Australia with 2.
For the Games this year, Rio is utilizing 32 competition venues in four different regions of the city – this shouldn’t affect the team’s logistics however, as the similar sports have all been grouped together. Thanks to the events being meticulously staggered across the 17 days to make sure that everything goes as smoothly as possible.
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How many people does it take to run this event? We’re expecting Rio 2016 to make use of around 45,000 volunteers, 8,000 employees and a whacking 85,000 outsourced staff – this includes security and catering etc. That’s nearly 140,000 people working on an event that’s just 17 days long, or 8,117 people per day!
The Athletes
Over 200 countries, 206 to be precise, will be sending athletes to compete in this Games. How many athletes exactly? Well, if everything goes to plan we should see 10,500 sportsmen and women representing their countries in their chosen discipline.
In the history of the Summer Olympics, the United States have put the most athletes forward – a grand total of 7,602! The numbers game clearly works for them, as the USA have managed to claim the most medals of any competing country with 2,425 medals, that’s:
- 990 Gold
- 764 Silver
- 671 Bronze
This is a tactic that also seems to have worked for Great Britain, who’ve put forward 5,447 participants and brought home a total of 811 medals. That significant haul places the UK third, behind the Soviet Union who haven’t competed since 1988 but amassed a staggering 1010 medals.
Medals aside, who are the athletes that have been talked about the most? Here’s the top 10 most Tweeted about individuals of the last Olympics:
- Usain Bolt
- Michael Phelps
- Tom Daley
- Ryan Lochte
- Gabby Douglas
- Andy Murray
- Kobe Byrant
- Yohan Blake
- Lee Chong Wei
- LeBron James
Every single of the above mentioned athletes received over 1 million tweets with Usain Bolt receiving over 74,000 tweets per minute for both his 100m and 200m sprints – that’s a whole lot of Twitter chatter.
The Events
These 10,500 participants will be competing for only 306 gold medals across just 42 different sports. Rio will also be the first time in 112 years that golf has been an Olympic sport and rugby is also back on the cards after 92 years of not being featured.
What’s the hottest ticket going at Rio 2016? Surprisingly, it’s volleyball – and by quite a margin! With over 15 million Brazilians regularly playing volleyball, it is undoubtedly the country’s number one sport, despite their religious love of football.
How does this compare to London 2012? An analysis of Twitter and over 150 million Olympics related tweets found that the most talked about event was football/ fútbol/ soccer with over 5 million tweets! Following this, the most popular topics were swimming, athletics, gymnastics and volleyball.
The Technology
Think about how many emails you get on a daily basis – how many do you think a huge event like the Olympics sends and receives? Well, with over 15,000 email accounts being created, 16,000 mobiles being provided, 15,000 landlines being used and over 16,000 walkie-talkies on hand the communications for these games are going to be intense.
Spectators can expect to benefit from second-screen applications, giving then the ability to witness their favourite sports in a completely new way. This is particularly interesting to anyone who loves stats, as they will be able to bring up information about anyone participating in the event – look at previous record holders, collect and visualise data.
In addition to this, we’ll see 3D mapping, companies creating apps to increase the ‘Olympic experience’, greater performance tracking of athletes, specifically designed kit to help muscular performance and reduce fatigue, better methods for recovery and injury prevention, and an array of high tech customer consumables.
Needless to say, Rio 2016 is going to be a data-packed and fun-filled event that sports lovers around the world are going to enjoy and remember!
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