How One Olympic Historian Is Going for Data Gold in Sochi

Think the biggest challenge at the Sochi Winter Olympics will be the snowboad stunts or death-defying ski jumps? Try doing the work of an Olympic historian whose hobby is to collect and store the loads of data that Olympic athletes generate.

During the 2012 Summer Olympics alone, more than 200 hundred nations competed in 300 events. And since the beginning of the modern Olympics in 1896, there have been 20 Winter Games and 26 Summer Games. Needless to say, that’s a lot of names, distances and world records to track. From the stone tablets used to immortalize winners during the ancient times, to the newsprint and hard drives of the modern games, the Olympics might be the biggest data storage challenge in sporting history.

Stone Tablets to Bits & Bytes 

Bill Mallon would know. He’s the author of more than 20 books about the Olympic Games, former president of the International Society of Olympic Historians and the founder of OlyMADMen, a society of Olympic historians and statisticians. Mallon has compiled Olympic data from local archives and other sources since the early 1980s and served as a consultant statistician to the International Olympic Committee, which earned him the Silver Olympic Order in 2001.

Stone tablets might be good for posterity, but they’re not easily searchable by journalists or enthusiasts interested in Olympic data. Before the Internet, people would have to either visit local archives in host cities where games were held, or browse sports magazines and newspapers in libraries to access data. Mallon has travelled as far as Switzerland and France to scour local archives by, literally, sifting through boxes of documents.

That began to change following the 1960 Winter Games in Squaw Valley, Calif., when Olympic results were computerized for the first time.

“That was the beginning of the modern era,” says Mallon. “It was also the first time that the Olympics began to publish official results books that included lists of all of the competitors.”

From: http://subzeroblog.acronis.com/posts/how-one-olympic-historian-going-data-gold-sochi

This morning Austrian Matthias Mayer won the men’s downhill, the blue riband event of Alpine skiing. Also noted is that his father, Helmut Mayer, won a silver medal in Super-G back in 1988 at Calgary. Has it ever happened before that a parent/child have both won Olympic medals? By now, do you think we’d ask that if it hadn’t happened?

OK, this is a difficult query for our database, so we should be a little cautious with the numbers. But we found 148 examples of a parent and a child both winning an Olympic medal. Now if we limit this to both winning an individual medal, this limits it a great deal – this has only happened 23 times. And if we limit it to the same individual event, this has only happened 7 times, and only once at the Winter Olympics. In fact, the Mayers (Matthias/Helmut) became only the second example of parent/children medalists in any individual events at the Winter Olympics.

There are a couple other examples in combative sports (boxing, wrestling, etc.), where you could consider slightly different weight classes as the same event, but here are the 7 times a parent and child have both medaled in the same Olympic event (considering men/women analogues as the same event):

• Oscar Swahn and his son, Alfred Swahn, both Sweden, won medals in both running target and running target, double shot events. In fact, they both won gold medals in running target (single shot), the only example of a parent/child winning gold medals in the same individual event. Oscar won gold in running target in 1908 and Alfred in 1912.
• Jack Kelly (USA) and his son, Jack, Jr., both won medals in single sculls rowing. The father won a gold in 1920 while Jack Jr took bronze in 1956.
• Americans Pat McCormick and her daughter, Kelly, both won medals in springboard diving. Pat famously won golds in 1952-56 in both springboard and platform, while Kelly won a silver (1984) and a bronze (1988) on the springboard.
• Soviet Aleksandr Makarov and his son, Sergey (RUS), both won medals in the javelin throw. Aleksandr won a silver in 1980, while Sergey won two bronzes in the event, in 2000-04.
• Myriam Jerusalmi-Fox and her daughter, Jess Fox, both won medals in kayak slalom. Notably, they did it for different countries – Jerusalmi-Fox winning a bronze for France in 1996, and Jess Fox winning a silver for Australia in 2012.
• Another cross-national example is one of the two father-daughter examples. This is Valery Lyukin, who won a gymnastics silver in the 1988 individual all-around for the Soviet Union, while his daughter, Nastia Liukin, won gold in that event (women’s version) for the United States in 2008.
• The other father-daughter example is the only time this has happened at the Winter Olympics. In 1968, Odd Martinsen (NOR) won a silver medal in the men’s 30 km cross-country race, while in 2002, his daughter, Bente Skari-Martinsen, won bronze in the same event for women.

Albert Demchenko (RUS) competed in men’s luge yesterday and Japan’s Noriaki Kasai competed in men’s normal hill ski jumping. Not too earth shattering until one considers this made them the first athletes to have competed in 7 Winter Olympics. Both have competed continuously since the 1992 Albertville Games, a span of 22 years.

The Summer Olympic is 10, held by Canadian equestrian Ian Millar. Two athletes have competed in 9 Olympics – Austrian sailor Hubert Raudauschl and Latvian/Soviet shooter Afanasijs Kuzmins. Six athletes have competed in 8 Summer Olympics, and 18 have competed in 7.

USA’s Travis Ganong finished 5th with Bode Miller 8th. USA has never before had 2 skiiers finish in top 9 of men’s Olympic downhill

Sorry, guys, posted quickly as top 10, but at Torino in 2006, Darron Rahlves placed 10th and Bode Miller was 5th.

• Speed Skating – Men’s 500 metres Event Factsheets

• Short-Track Speed Skating – Men’s 1500 m Event Factsheets

• Freestyle Skiing – Men’s Moguls Event Factsheets

• Biathlon – Men’s Pursuit Event Factsheets

• Alpine Skiing – Women’s Combined Event Factsheets

USA Factsheets for events ending tomorrow, Monday, 10 February

• USA Alpine Skiing – Women’s Combined Event Factsheets
• USA Biathlon – Men’s Pursuit Event Factsheets
• USA Freestyle Skiing – Men’s Moguls Event Factsheets
• USA Speed Skating – Men’s 500 metres Event Factsheets
• USA Short-Track Speed Skating – Men’s 1500 m Event Factsheets