The Olympics: Winter medal significance among "less winning" countries

        The Summer Olympics are right around the corner (At least I hope they really happen...). Even though we get an Olympics every 2 years (Summer and Winter), I can't help but notice that I get much more excited for the Summer Olympics. Maybe it is because I just love the warm weather and can't manage to stay upright on the bunny slope for more than ten feet (And that is after falling face first off of the ski lift!). As we approach the highly anticipated international event this summer, I felt that it would be interesting to look into the difference in "importance" of the two different Olympics. As a citizen of the United States, I definitely take for granted how frequently we win medals. Between 1896 and 2018, the US has won 2,828 medals! It is not surprising that most of these medals are from the Summer Olympics since there are more sports and events involved in comparison to the Winter Olympics. After looking through the data, I started to think about how there may be certain countries that rely more on winter sports to win medals. I casually hypothesized that countries among the bottom ten in total medals (at least 500 total medals) would rely more on winter medals than summer medals. This is based on an assumption that "less total winning" countries would be countries that are stronger in the winter sports. Below are charts that show the distribution of summer and winter medals among the top 10 winning countries and the bottom 10 winning countries (at least 500 medals). I use an relatively arbitrary value of 500 in order to work with more consistent data.

        In order to determine the reliance of Winter Olympic medals for these countries, I calculated the percentage of medals that came from the Winter Olympics for each country and then averaged these values among the top and bottom 10 countries. For the top 10 countries, the average percentage of winter medals was about 22%. For the bottom 10 countries, the average percentage was about 25%. Although this value is higher, I was a bit surprised as I expected these less winning countries to have more reliance on winter sports. However, there is a clear correlation between the percentage of winter medals and the geography of the country. In other words, colder countries, where winter sports are more popular, showed a heavier reliance on the Winter Olympics to provide medals to add to their total. Canada owes about 40% of its medals to the Winter Olympics and Norway owes about 71%! This data tells a different story if we remove Australia from the bottom 10 since winter medals only account for 3% of its total medals. The top 10 countries show data with a smaller standard deviation, so the average makes a little more sense. Therefore, using average as a means for determining the importance of winter sports in relation to medal totals may not have been the best strategy (since there is clearly some asymmetry in the distribution of the data for the bottom 10 countries). 

The Process: 

        I found this dataset on Kaggle and found that The Olympics would be an interesting topic to explore since I have summer fever! I extracted the data and analyzed its contents on Google Sheets. Since these are CSV files, they can be opened on Google Sheets or Excel. Next, I made two pivot tables that more clearly showed total medals, summer medals, and winter medals. I sorted these by total medals to find the top 10 most winning countries with respect to total medals. Another pivot table was created on another tab to find the same information for the bottom 10 countries with at least 500 medals in their history. I reordered the data in ascending order to show the least winning country first. On both pivot tables, I added a formula for percentage of winter medals out of the total and then took the average of the top 10 and bottom 10 in order to compare. To visualize the data, I utilized the graphing function on Google Sheets and stacked the data to better represent percentages. This was a great opportunity to test my data analysis skills. It has definitely been a little while since I have gone in depth into data analysis. Back in my research labs, I had more software to automate data analysis, so it was good to get the chance to see what I could do on my own. I hope to be able to create my own graphics and better utilize formulas through improvement of programming skills. Some day, I hope to be proficient in various programming languages to make data analysis more specific and, simply, more fun. This will take a lot of time and practice - but it could be a good skill to work on while I watch the Olympics!