The results from the Olympic Games are a great data source for infographic designers, here are 2 examples from the New York Times: one that I like, and one that I do not like.

The country medal count bubbles is cute but not very useful. It tests the reader’s geography knowledge to figure out what the countries are that have no data label inside them. A simple bar chart will do a much better job, and will leave space for a second bar chart: inhabitants per medal. You would always expect a country with a larger population to produce more medals.


This overview of 100m running medals over the past century is great though. It transforms the basic finish time data into something much more interesting, where on the 100m track would each runner be the moment the 2012 crosses the line. The NYT also created a nice video to analyze the results.


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