London 2012 and data journalism: what did we learn at the Olympics?

It was two weeks of elite sport, emotion - and data. So how did we deal with it and what did we learn? These are the 12 lessons we learned from London 2012
More data journalism and data visualisations from the Guardian
London 2012 Olympic athletes visualised for the Guardian
London 2012 Olympic athletes visualised for the Guardian. Click image to embiggen

There was never a guarantee that it would amount to anything for us. The Olympics may have been the only news story in town last week and would undoubtedly produce great journalism, but would it result in data journalism?

At its essence, this is the gathering of stories from data. It's more than just producing a few charts - data visualisation is often the expression of data journalism, but the process of digging through the data to find the stories that matter, that is at its heart.

At some levels the omens were not good. The key results data is locked up in lucrative deals between the International Olympic Committee and major news organisations. So, those results tables on our site, the BBC, The Telegraph and so on were paid - The Guardian's is a feed from the New York Times and we were explicitly banned from releasing that feed as open data for you to download and explore with.

As I wrote earlier, while it was not the first Open Data Olympics - it was arguably the first data Olympics.

So, what can an open data journalism site do in that situation? This is what we learned.

1. There is more than one way of reading a medals table

Alternative medals table interactive guide
Alternative medals table interactive guide. Click image to explore it

Olympics are always judged on who gets the most medals and which country wins the most golds. Which normally means the attention focuses on the traditional Olympic winners: the US, China, Russia and the UK.

But what if there was another way to see the Olympic medals table?

We worked with statisticians at imperial College to produce this alternative medal table, where countries are judged not simply on how many medals they won but how it compares to each country's GDP, or population, or team size.

And the final winner on these measures? Russia.

Says Imperial College statistician Christoforos Anagnostopoulos

The UK is outperformed by Russia despite having more gold medals, the reasons is that we are here ranking according to the total number of medals, where golds count for 3, silvers for 2, and bronzes for 1 - and Russia has far more of the latter two types than the UK. If we constrain our model to only consider golds, the UK comes at the very top of the list - and that's even after correcting for wealth, and population

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2. How each team's performance compared to 2008

Olympic medal day-by-day interactive
Olympic medal day-by-day interactive. Click image to explore it

It may be hard to believe now with Team GB in third place, but after a couple of days questions were raised about how well the team was doing, compared to 2008 in Beijing. By day three, Team GB was placed 20th in the league table, compared to seventh at the same stage last time. The interactive above was updated every day to allow users to see exactly how the six biggest teams were doing each day.

In the final analysis, Team GB, Russia and Germany all did better than they did in 2008, Australia and China did worse. Team USA got more golds but fewer medals overall.

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3. Almost two in five of Team GB's medalists went to private school

Bradley Wiggins before the start of the men's individual time trial cycling event. Photograph: Matt Rourke/AP
Bradley Wiggins: state educated medal winner. Photograph: Matt Rourke/AP

The figures are controversial: according to Lord Moynihan, head of the British Olympic Authority, in 2008 50% of Team GB's gold medals were won by privately-educated athletes. However, it looks as if the real figure even in Beijing was lower than that. And that figure seems to have held steady or even increased slightly in 2012.

As the games progressed, we were interested in who the athletes were who were winning for Team GB - what they won for and where they went to school.

Malcolm Tozer, the expert on British medal success and education says that these games saw 37% of medals being won by privately-educated athletes. Their number increased from 26 in 2008 to 44 in 2012.

Tozer adds that

Independent schools as a country (not including a gold from Ruta Meilutyte of Plymouth College, representing Lithuania) would have finished 12th in the medal table

This is up four places on Beijing.

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4. The world's athletes are shaped by their sports

Olympic athletes interactive by height, age and weight
Olympic athletes interactive by height, age and weight

Do you look like an Olympic athlete? If you are aged 26, weigh 72.8kg and are 176.9cm tall then the answer is yes.

Thanks to the first comprehensive scrape of every London 2012 Olympic athlete we can create a real picture of what kinds of people compete in the games.

We analysed the 10,383 Olympians taking part in the London 2012 Games to see the spread of ages, heights and weights across the sports for men and women. And if you think you know what it takes to compete in the Games, you may find some of the results surprising.

Hiroshi Hoketsu
Hiroshi Hoketsu on Whisper; he says his biggest motivation is to feel he's improving. Photograph: Markus Schreiber/AP

If you imagine that all Olympic athletes are young, for instance, then you would be wrong – while the average is 26, there are 187 athletes over 40 at this year's games, including the eldest, Hiroshi Hoketsu, 71 years old, who competed in the dressage for Japan.

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5. Team GB wasn't as far behind Team USA as we thought

Britain and the United States have the largest two teams in the Olympics with over 1,000 athletes between them – but how do they compare?

Well, team GB is younger, lighter and smaller than their trans-Atlantic counterparts. Its average age is 26.3, compared to 27.1 for the US – a gap of 3%. It is also 2% lighter at an average of 74.5kg, compared to 75.9kg.

But Team GB, although it has fewer medals, compares well to its transatlantic allay, with a wider spread of gold medals in different sports. Swimming dominates the US medal table - with a total of 31 medals in all, including 16 golds (with Michael Phelps contributing three of them). That is followed by in athletics and fewer medals in other sports.

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6. Ye Shiwen is a fast swimmer

China's Ye Shiwen
China's Ye Shiwen poses with her gold medal after winning the women's 200m individual medley final at the London 2012 Olympic Games. Photograph: Toby Melville/Reuters

Ye Shiwen swam the last 50m of her 400m individual medley final quicker than the winner of the men's race. How 'unbelievable' is this in statistical terms?

Dozens of arguments have been made as to why Ye Shiwen's sensational swim evening should or shouldn't be viewed with suspicion, many of them ill conceived, but one that stands up to scrutiny concerns a particular statistic.

Ye Shiwen flew down the final length of Saturday's 400m individual medley final in 28.93 seconds, seventeen hundredths of a second faster than Ryan Lochte, the winner of the equivalent mens' race.

This fact is significant not because swimming aficionados are sexist and believe that a women cannot naturally swim faster than a man, but because it is a clear statistical anomaly.

Explore our interactive chart to see where Ye's performance ranks against those of swimmers at similarly high profile competitions between 2010 and 2012.

 Read more

7. Who really paid for the Olympics?

Olympic spending interactive
Olympic spending interactive

Think you know how much London 2012's Olympic games cost? Think again. The £9bn figure that we have seen is just the largest part of a complicated set of arrangements involving public and private finance.

We thought it would be a good idea to gather all that data together in one place - to provide a definitive guide to this Olympic's funding.

We've pulled together data published by the Olympic Delivery Authority (ODA), the Department for Culture, Media and Sport (DCMS) - and what we know of the London Organising Committee of the Olympic and Paralympic Games (Locog) to piece together a detailed picture of funding and spending.

The difference between Locog and the ODA is, as a Locog spokeswoman put it to me: "the ODA is building the theatre; we put on the show". The ODA has spent £6.248bn of public money on getting the grounds and venues ready, with another £2.537bn coming spent via other bodies such as local authorities and direct from the DCMS itself. Locog has budgeted the smallest amount: £2bn.

So, how did we get here? We have identified spending of around £11bn - which is essentially the government's £9bn plus Locog's published budget of £2bn. Locog will not publish any details until after the games themselves, so we have divided up its funding using what we know, which is that Locog is paying for half the budget for ceremonies, half the budget for the paralympics and, obviously, the cost of running the events themselves.

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8. How Twitter felt about the Games


Who are the social media stars of this Olympics? We've never had such access to detailed data about social media - and about how we use it. And the Olympics is an ultimately emotional event.

And at London 2012, we had some genuinely innovative approaches. Emoto 2012 for instance, provided a real-time guide to Twitter sentiment, as tweets were being posted.

This interactive from Infomous monitored all social media - again live as it was happening.

And it's worth checking out Guardian America's interactive team guides to the Twitter popularity of athletes, produced with

9. If Michael Phelps were a country, how big would he be?

US swimmer Michael Phelps is the most-decorated Olympian of all time - after he won his 22nd Olympic medal, and his fourth gold of these Games.

He would be ahead of Georgia, Uzbekistan, Croatia, Chile, Israel, the old Russian Empire and Tunisia. He's also ahead India, Taiwan, Portugal, Nigeria and Thailand. In terms of golds, he's ahead of North Korea.

10. How the Olympics - and Britain - changed since the 1908 games

1908 Olympic fencing poster
1908 Olympic fencing poster

London was the first city ever to have hosted three Olympics. In 1908, at the height of the British empire, it was a last-minute choice, stepping in for Rome after the eruption of Mount Vesuvius. In 1948, Germany and Japan were banned following their wartime defeat, the Soviet Union was absent and this was the 'austerity Olympics' in a broke country. So, how does 2012 compare?

The House of Commons Library, the team which usually supplies MPs with the answers to tricky research questions, is publishing the ultimate statistical guide to how Britain, London and the Olympic games themselves have changed. Olympic Britain, out today, charts how the world the Olympians of 1908 knew would seem unrecogniseable today. And how we got there.

In 1908, the first modern Olympics of 1896 were still a live memory, and this was quite a different world. The majority of the competitors came from the imperial empires of Britain, Russia, Germany, the Austro-Hungarians and France, plus the new power: America. The five rings of the Olympic symbol weren't invented until Baron Pierre De Coubertin presented it to the world in 1914.

Although the colonies were allowed to participate, it was hardly encouraged for fear it would lead to national identity and undermine their European masters. Two indigenous Africans from South Africa had been allowed to compete in the St Louis games of 1904, featuring in 'athletic games for savages', although they were allowed to enter the marathon, finishing ninth and twelfth out of 36. It wasn't until 1952 that any other sub Saharan country participated, Ghana, although it didn't win a medal until Clement Quartey won a boxing silver in 1960.

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11. Providing the raw data itself is as important as writing about it

When an event produces as much information as the Olympic games - but the data is as closed of as this, then there is a role in simply making that data easy to surface. If you're looking, you can find most things here in our London Olympics data special site.

Here are some of the raw data highlights:

Every medal won in the 2012 Games
Every record broken at London 2012
Every athlete competing at London 2012
 Every result for every athlete in every event
The Schedule as open data

12. A major news story always produces data journalism

Torch route graphic
Olympic torch relay: the route and facts about the torch and bearers Illustration: Paul Scruton for the Guardian

When as story dominates the news as the Olympics have done, cost as much as they have done and involve as many people as it did, there will always be data to analyse and generate stories from. It's more than just reporting results.

And, as the games developed, the big questions of the day became around how to interpret the stream of numbers emanating from Stratford's Olympic Park and venues around the region. It became less about using other people's data and generating our own.

As soon as the 8,000 runners started carrying the Olympic torch around the country, data journalists started working at breaking down the numbers behind the news. This investigation by Help Me Investigate and published not he Datablog, for instance, looked into the hundreds of 'ghost runners', who weren't on the official list but were instead placed there by sponsors. The 25% of places outside of public nomination campaigns were allocated through internal processes at commercial partners, the International Olympic Committee, sporting bodies, direct invitation from Locog, and the relay's sponsors - one of whom allocated 15% of its 1,360 places for its own staff. Some data on places is still missing.

The fact that this information was closed and required a major investigative effort reflects a lot of what we know about the Olympics: the stuff you really want to know isn't necessarily the information that's open and published freely. It's much more likely to be hidden right around the corner.

And if data journalism is about anything, it's about turning that corner and telling that story.

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