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The Paralympic Games are in full swing this week, giving us yet more superb high-quality sport. I've always got my eye on Wheelchair Basketball & Wheelchair Rugby (cheeky plug for a viz I made after the Tokyo Games coming later). I love the complex tactics involved both for playing the game itself and also in balancing the different skills and disability levels across the team. I've had a go at Wheelchair Basketball in the past and I would encourage everyone to give it a go if you get the opportunity. It's brilliant.
It's been a fortnight since the last round-up and I'm pleased to be able to bring you a selection of the highest-quality visualisations this week. So let's dive in!
I'm kicking things off with a Paralympic maps from the King of Maps Dennis Kao. Dennis has created a typically elegant and minimal small multiple map for each of the venues used in the Paralympic Games. The colour scheme he has chosen is really striking and he has used the Paris Games logo as the marker for each location. I particularly like the overview map in the bottom corner which allows you to see where these locations are within France itself too. Chapeau Dennis!
So now you know about the venues, why don't you check you more about the sports and events with Steph Blair's visualisation covering every single medal event! We've previously featured this but I wanted to give it a quick nod again now that the Paralympics have started. Steph has done a great job of showing the scale of the Games, as well as the number of medals available in each sport and what the different classification types competing are.
Moving slightly back in time to the Olympics and Jacob Rothemund has highlighted one of the feel-good stories from Paris 2024 - the culmination of Jess Fox's quest to win gold medal. Jess has been the most dominant paddler in international canoe slalom for a very long time and although she has won an Olympic medal at the London, Rio and Tokyo Games (!!) the gold had eluded her until now. Jacob's visualisation does a great job of both explaining more about the sport before moving on to show Jess's journey. As Jacob notes, the previous gold & silver medal winners competed in Paris too but had large time penalties - whereas Jess modelled her impressive consistency at the highest level to become the only female paddler to have won a medal of any colour at the last four Games. Legendary. Bonus fun fact, all three female canoe slalom disciplines at the Games were won by either Jess or her sister Noemie.
For a recent Makeover Monday challenge, Damola Ladipo has created a visualisation allowing an alternative view of the final medal table - letting the user switch the ranking between medals won per population and a more traditional view of most medals won. Damola's visualisation evokes the Periodic Table for me, with each country taking the place of an element, and the supporting medal & population information taking the place of the atomic structure information. Similar to Dennis, Damola has picked a great colour scheme which really allows the colours of different continents to shine. It's fascinating to see which countries rise to the top of the both ranking systems, and really shows how global the Olympics are.
Shangruff Raina also took part in the Makeover Monday challenge, and has created a great dashboard allowing the viewer to drill down into the medals won by each country. I really like the interactive elements in this dashboard, and how there are a number of nested graphs that all build on the story. There is so much information presented and it is all clearly laid out and separated so that it doesn't become overwhelming. A great example of user-focused design (and a great way to lose some time clicking through the difference countries).
Last up for our trio of Makeover Monday is Tamas Varga. I absolutely love this viz, from Tamas' choice of fonts through to his decision to show every country. There's something I find really elegant about all of his design choices and it especially comes to life when you focus on just one country. I think this bump chart is a success in every way.
We now turn our attention away from the Paralympics and Olympics, towards Zak Saucede's netball goal momentum dashboard which he has now published. This is a really cool way to view how the momentum moves in netball matches (and works really well because they're so high scoring). I particularly like how you can switch between the running total for the whole match, and resetting the total for each quarter which can give a very different flavour of how the game unfolded.
Fellow Sports TUG (more on that later) co-lead Ryan Soares has taken a look at the golf courses that were in the 2024 season, and which ones are more difficult than others. Ryna has used a very neat expandable table format to pack loads of extra details about each course out of the way of the main view. Ryan's deceptively simple table formatting goes into my folder of "great examples of how tables can be visualisations too" and his sparing use of colour really helps it to pop. The beeswarm at the top is an excellent addition that ties the table into an overview too.
In Dan Wade's own words, "F1 is back from the summer break and so am I with another project". This time, Dan is looking at how the different teams in Formula 1 have been known through the years. In what has become an unplanned theme for this week, Dan's use of colour in this visualisation is really clever in separating the different team names. and Ferrari & McLaren really stand out having only been known by those names. I also had no idea that some of the current teams could trace their roots so far back!
Last but not least - and to return to an Olympic theme - is my visualisation comparing the performances of British finalists & medallists. I wanted to see if I could come up with a way of showing which events were most competitive and which had runaway winners, and I think this does the job well, if I do say so myself! (If you're interesting in my methodology then please let me know and I'd be happy to tell you more about it). I was also inspired by a mental image I had of centrefold visualisations in newspapers growing up, although these vague memories might be entirely fictitious!
I'm very pleased with how it turned out, and that I managed to create some cool interactivity allowing the viewer to rotate the visualisation and expand the results of any day, within my single-sheet of map layers.
Two more things to close out this week.
Our very own one man tutorial machine CJ Mayes has published a new tutorial about radials in Tableau (I remember when radials would come in for a lot of unfair attack but now they are more correctly recognised as a hotness). CJ's tutorials are always great and I always come away with something to think about.
And the second is that the first rebooted Sports TUG session was held recently, with myself, Steven, Ryan-from-earlier and the ineffable Fred Fery as co-leads. We covered a bit of ground about what we're hoping to achieve with the Sports TUG going forwards, a little bit of a view about data roles in sports, and a superb show and tell of an award-winning visualisation. You can check out the recording here, and make sure you sign up to the Bevy page to informed about our upcoming sessions.
And that brings us to the end for this week! As always, thanks to the #SportsVizSunday community for continuing to create such wonderful and original visualisations. They are a joy to behold.
Mo & the SVS team
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