Hello and welcome to a special Olympic edition of The Crunch!
If there’s anything better than sitting on the couch watching the Olympics, it’s sitting on the couch watching the Olympics while also looking at amazing data visualisation about the Olympics that you are currently watching. Here is some of the best and most interesting work we’ve seen so far, and read to the end for two delicious food-related charts about economics.
It’s the datavis Olympics!
***
Medal-winning animations
Once again I (Nick) am wailing and gnashing my teeth at the lack of embedded gifs in the Guardian’s newsletter software. Because there have been some great data-driven animations produced during the Paris Olympics!
Let’s start with the amazing work of Krisztina Szűcs, a designer based in Budapest. Creator of the Cat Looking Out A Window With Blinds Bar Chart (a personal favourite format of mine), Szűcs is also the maker of some innovative animated charts showing how different sports have played out at the Olympics, covering swimming and fencing. My favourite so far though has to be this chart of the men’s pole vault final (view the animated version here):
And if you’re interested in a nice explainer about the mechanics of how pole-vaulting works, check out this piece from the Sydney Morning Herald.
Next up, have you ever wondered how you’d fare against an Olympian? In our feature comparing the greats of the 100 metre sprint, you can see how well an Average Person™ might do when running against Usain Bolt or Florence Griffith Joyner:
The result will probably not surprise you, unless you’re one of those people who think they could inexplicably do really well in the Olympics despite not actually being an Olympic athlete.
The final animation I’d like to share is from the New York Times (where else?), where the graphics team has a long history of reproducing races in a handy, bite-sized animation which plays well on social media. Animation is also a neat way of reliving the race without showing actual race footage, given the rights to Olympic broadcasts are tightly controlled. This year, the NYT team produced these 3D animations of swimming and sprinting.
***
Explainers aplenty
Outside of the regular charts, the Olympics are a fertile ground for graphical “explainers” – features which explain how a sport works, or how the fastest person is really fast, and so on. I suppose because suddenly there’s a need to know how scoring works in everything from handball to fencing so you can impress your friends and colleagues.
Reuters in particular have been prolific, producing an illustrated guide to every (!) Olympic sport, which you can check out here. They’ve also made this very nice scrolly-graphic which explains how the surf break at Teahupo’o in Tahiti produces such good waves:
Reuters also has an illustrated guide to the historical Olympic Games, which you can see here.
Elsewhere, Australia’s ABC News has made this fun interactive where you can pretend to be a diving judge (just so you know I scored very well):
The visual stories team at Nine (the Age, Sydney Morning Herald et al.) have also made explainers about swimming and sprinting, in addition to the pole-vaulting graphic I mentioned earlier.
***
Regular line charts but they’re about the Olympics
See title.
John Burn-Murdoch from the Financial Times has this chart, which nicely illustrates how far from behind Noah Lyles came to win the gold in the 100 metres sprint:
Also on the sprinting, we have this chart showing the progression of the 100 metre world record over time:
Some experts think the world record progression will plateau soon for running events, if they haven’t already, while swimming world records will continue to be broken. You can see a bunch of charts making this argument in this Washinton Post feature, if you have a subscription.
Off the Charts
Move over Big Mac index, it’s time for the soupy dumpling index!
The Big Mac index was invented by the Economist as a “‘lighthearted’ way of measuring purchasing power parity, and the idea is that by measuring the cost identical goods in different countries you can compare their economies.
The soupy dumpling index made by Axios leverages the rise of Taiwanese dumpling chain Din Tai Fung around the world, and tracks and compares the price of xiao long bao in 20 different cities around the world. Delicious!
Speaking of the Big Mac index, Australia’s ABC News have used the burger as a lens on inflation in Australia, looking at the cost of ingredients rising over time. However, the best part of this feature isn’t actually about the cost of ingredients at all, it’s the twist at the end (SPOILER) where you find out about the offshore transfer of “royalty payments” that McDonald’s Australia pays for the “intellectual property” of the burgers.
Bonus chart: this graphic from the Sydney Morning Herald showing the height of Armand Duplantis’ world record jump is a classic in the news media graphic genre of Measuring Things Using Other Things (see also, X is Y Olympic swimming pools’ worth of water, A is B stadiums full of people, and so on). It might not be a great chart in the Tuftian sense, but it’s certainly an aesthetic all of its own.
Sign up
If you would like to receive The Crunch to your email inbox every fortnight, sign up here.
