It’s all in the data

With timings down to the thousandth of a second and with both World and Olympic records at stake, the Olympic Games are a wonderful source for statistics, facts and figures of all types. The Olympics are unique as a regularly recurring global event of the highest profile which inherently gets people very excited about data, analysis, measurement, world records, and so forth.

Data and analytics can provide relevant and sometimes surprising results from different angles. With this in mind we can consider a range of “alternative” Olympic Games tables, drawing out different insights. For example: while the all-time medals table is inevitably dominated by countries with large populations – the USA, Russia, China - one interesting statistic is the top Olympic nations by population, in other words those who have made an impact on the medals tables despite their relatively small size.

If we look at the Olympic Medals won per million of population at the last Olympics at London 2012, we see that Jamaica, Trinidad & Tobago and the Bahamas were in the top five, along with New Zealand who won 13 medals and have a population of around 4million. But the overall winner – if we look at the data through this particular lens - was Grenada with 1 gold medal for a country with a population of little over 100,000.

Kirani James won the Olympic 400m at London 2012 in 43.94seconds – thus winning Grenada's first ever Olympic medal. The 400m used to be dominated by US sprinters, but in recent years has become a truly global event, and the Caribbean islands together have put in great performances in running events.

Data doesn’t exist in a silo. It likes being able to spread its wings and soar. Information is power, and insight is key. For companies worldwide, this consideration is critical to extracting value from their data, for actionable insight and sustainable competitive differentiation.