Our data consists of a list of Olympic athletes that have competed in the Olympics from 1896 to 2020. We have over 240,000 observations and 12 variables included in this data. We are going to subset the data in a way such that we are only looking at athletes from the United States and the United Kingdom. This subsetted data will include the following variables: Sex, Age, Team, Year, Season, City, Sport, and Medal. We are going to use the external data set linked below to look at the corruption levels and GDP per capita of the United States and United Kingdom and see if that has any impact on the performance of these countries in the Olympic Games. The dataset consists of five different spreadsheets for a total of 377 observations and 11 variables. We will use the three variables called corruption_index, unemployment_rate, and gdp_per_capita from three of the spreadsheets for a total of 227 observations.
Datasets:
Olympics 124 years Dataset(till 2020) | Kaggle
Our motivation for comparing the US and the UK's Olympic performance stems from the rich historical rivalry between these two nations in the Olympics. This rivalry has sparked our curiosity to dive deeper into their respective Olympic histories. We are driven by the desire to uncover the underlying aspects that have contributed to their success in terms of medal acquisition. By analyzing athlete demographics and external economic factors, we aim to provide an understanding of how they have shaped the performance of the US and the UK over time. Our research will look at how these countries compete and help us understand what other characteristics affect how well they do in the Olympics. This makes our study important for determining the qualities that influence Olympic medal attainment.
- How has the bronze/silver/gold medal count changed for both countries over time?
- In which years did either the US or the UK perform exceptionally well or poorly in terms of medal counts?
- Are there specific Olympic sports or events where one country consistently outperforms the other?
- In which season (Summer/Winter) have each country fared better relative to the other?
- How has hosting the Olympics affected medal acquisition rates for the US and UK?
- How does the ratio of gold medals to total medals differ between the United States and the UK over time?
- Are there differences in the number of male and female athletes representing each country?
- Do the male and female athletes achieve similar success rates?
- Does one country tend to send younger or more experienced athletes to the Olympics?
- Which country tends to excel in team sports, and which excels in individual sports?
- Which country specializes in gold medals in which individual or team sport consistently throughout the years?