Package {olympicAthletes}

olympicAthletes: Olympic Athlete Event Data, Athens 1896 to Milano-Cortina 2026

Description

A tidy, long-format dataset of every athlete-event participation in the modern Olympic Games. Extends the rgriff23 Olympic_history dataset (1896-2016) with five additional editions scraped from olympedia.org: PyeongChang 2018, Tokyo 2020, Beijing 2022, Paris 2024, and Milano-Cortina 2026.

Datasets

• olympic_athletes: ~315,000 athlete-event rows.

• medal_table: verified medal tables for every edition, 1896-2026.

• editions: edition-level metadata for every Games, 1896-2026.

Author(s)

Maintainer: Chester Ismay chester.ismay@gmail.com

See Also

Useful links:

• https://github.com/moderndive/olympicAthletes

• https://moderndive.github.io/olympicAthletes/

• Report bugs at https://github.com/moderndive/olympicAthletes/issues

Olympic Art Competitions entries, 1912-1948

Description

The subset of olympic_athletes with sport == "Art Competitions": the painters, sculptors, writers, musicians, and architects who won Olympic medals when the arts were medal events. A convenience dataset for exploring how these entrants differ from athletic competitors (notably in age). Columns are identical to olympic_athletes.

Usage

art_competitions_athletes

Format

A data frame with 3,578 rows and 16 variables; see olympic_athletes for the full column descriptions.

Source

See olympic_athletes.

Examples

data(art_competitions_athletes)
head(art_competitions_athletes)

Olympic athletics (track and field) athlete-event participations, 1896-2026

Description

The subset of olympic_athletes with sport == "Athletics". A convenience dataset so examples can focus on a single sport without first filtering. Columns are identical to olympic_athletes.

Usage

athletics_athletes

Format

A data frame with 43,062 rows and 16 variables; see olympic_athletes for the full column descriptions.

Source

See olympic_athletes.

Examples

data(athletics_athletes)
head(athletics_athletes)

Olympic basketball athlete-event participations, 1896-2026

Description

The subset of olympic_athletes with sport == "Basketball". A convenience dataset so examples can focus on a single sport without first filtering. Columns are identical to olympic_athletes.

Usage

basketball_athletes

Format

A data frame with 5,159 rows and 16 variables; see olympic_athletes for the full column descriptions.

Source

See olympic_athletes.

Examples

data(basketball_athletes)
head(basketball_athletes)

Olympic curling athlete-event participations, 1896-2026

Description

The subset of olympic_athletes with sport == "Curling". A convenience dataset so examples can focus on a single sport without first filtering. Columns are identical to olympic_athletes.

Usage

curling_athletes

Format

A data frame with 961 rows and 16 variables; see olympic_athletes for the full column descriptions.

Source

See olympic_athletes.

Examples

data(curling_athletes)
head(curling_athletes)

Edition-level metadata for every Olympic Games, 1896-2026

Description

One row per Olympic edition (including cancelled Games) with verified totals for participants, NOCs, medal events, and disciplines, plus opening/closing ceremony dates.

Usage

editions

Format

A data frame with 62 rows and 15 variables:

edition_id

Integer. Olympedia's internal edition number.

games

Character. e.g. "2024 Summer".

year

Integer.

season

Character. "Summer" or "Winter".

city_local_latin

Character. Host city in the local-language form rendered in the Latin alphabet, i.e. native Latin-script names retain their diacritics ("Athína", "München", "Montréal", "Ciudad de México"), and non-Latin-script names use a standard romanization rather than the city's native script ("Moskva", "Tokyo", "Beijing", "PyeongChang"). The column is therefore always ASCII-or-Latin-1 and never contains the city's native non-Latin alphabet.

city_english

Character. Common English name of the host city (e.g. "Athens", "Munich", "Moscow", "Mexico City").

country

Character.

opening_ceremony, closing_ceremony

Date or NA. ISO-8601. NA for cancelled editions and a few early Games where Olympedia does not record exact dates.

participants

Integer or NA. Olympedia's headline participant count. NA for cancelled editions.

nocs

Integer or NA. Number of NOCs represented.

medal_events

Integer or NA. Number of medal events.

disciplines

Integer or NA. Number of distinct disciplines.

notes

Character. Free-text edition notes (e.g. cancellation reasons, intercalated-Games status).

source

Character. Olympedia URL.

Source

https://www.olympedia.org/

Examples

data(editions)
editions[, c("games", "city_local_latin", "city_english",
              "participants", "medal_events")]

Olympic gymnastics athlete-event participations, 1896-2026

Description

The subset of olympic_athletes with sport == "Gymnastics". A convenience dataset so examples can focus on a single sport without first filtering. Columns are identical to olympic_athletes.

Usage

gymnastics_athletes

Format

A data frame with 29,413 rows and 16 variables; see olympic_athletes for the full column descriptions.

Source

See olympic_athletes.

Examples

data(gymnastics_athletes)
head(gymnastics_athletes)

Verified medal tables for every Olympic edition, 1896-2026

Description

One row per (Games, NOC) with verified Gold/Silver/Bronze counts cross- checked against olympedia.org and Wikipedia/IOC. Use this rather than aggregating olympic_athletes when you want the per-team-event medal convention (one medal per gold-winning ice hockey team, not 25).

Usage

medal_table

Format

A data frame with 1,929 rows and 11 variables:

edition_id

Integer. Olympedia's internal edition number.

games

Character. e.g. "2026 Winter".

year

Integer.

season

Character. "Summer" or "Winter".

noc

Character. Three-letter IOC code.

country

Character. Full country/team name.

gold, silver, bronze

Integer. Medal counts.

total

Integer. Sum of the three.

notes

Character. Free-text notes (e.g. shared medals, post-hoc reallocations).

Source

https://www.olympedia.org/ (manually verified per edition).

Examples

data(medal_table)
subset(medal_table, year == 2024)[1:10, ]

Olympic athlete-event participations, 1896-2026

Description

One row per (athlete, Games, event) participation across every modern Summer and Winter Olympic Games from Athens 1896 through Milano-Cortina 2026. Rows for 1896-2016 come from the rgriff23 Olympic_history dataset (originally scraped from sports-reference.com); rows for 2018-2026 were scraped from olympedia.org.

Usage

olympic_athletes

Format

A data frame with 315,094 rows and 16 variables:

id

Integer. Unique athlete ID. Original IDs are 1..135571; athletes new to the 2018-2026 editions get IDs starting at 1,000,000 to avoid collision.

name

Character. ASCII-folded athlete name.

sex

Character. "M" or "F".

age

Integer or NA. Approximate age at the start of the Games, computed from date of birth (Feb 1 reference for Winter, Jul 15 for Summer).

height

Numeric or NA. Height in centimetres.

weight

Numeric or NA. Weight in kilograms.

team

Character. Country/team name as displayed on the source.

noc

Character. Three-letter IOC code (e.g. "USA", "NOR", "ROC").

games

Character. "<year> <Summer/Winter>", e.g. "2026 Winter".

year

Integer. Calendar year of the Games. Tokyo 2020 is coded as 2020 even though it was held in 2021 (IOC convention).

season

Character. "Summer" or "Winter".

city_local_latin

Character. Host city in the local-language form rendered in the Latin alphabet, i.e. native Latin-script names retain their diacritics ("Athína", "München", "Montréal", "Ciudad de México"), and non-Latin-script names use a standard romanization rather than the city's native script ("Moskva", "Tokyo", "Beijing", "PyeongChang"). The column is therefore always ASCII-or-Latin-1 and never contains the city's native non-Latin alphabet.

city_english

Character. Common English name of the host city (e.g. "Athens", "Munich", "Moscow", "Mexico City").

sport

Character. Sport name. The 2018-2026 rows are normalised to the original sport names where possible (e.g. "Cycling Track" and "Cycling Road" both collapse to "Cycling").

event

Character. Event name including the sport prefix.

medal

Character or NA. "Gold", "Silver", "Bronze", or NA. Per-player: every member of a medal-winning team roster gets a row with the team's medal.

Source

• 1896-2016: Griffin, R. (2018). Olympic_history. https://github.com/rgriff23/Olympic_history

• 2018-2026: https://www.olympedia.org/ (scraped April 2026).

Examples

data(olympic_athletes)
head(olympic_athletes)
table(olympic_athletes$year, olympic_athletes$season)


# Top medal-winning NOCs at Paris 2024 (one row per athlete-medal)
library(dplyr)
olympic_athletes |>
  filter(year == 2024, !is.na(medal)) |>
  count(noc, medal) |>
  tidyr::pivot_wider(names_from = medal, values_from = n, values_fill = 0) |>
  arrange(desc(Gold + Silver + Bronze))

Olympic athlete-event participations at the Paris 2024 Summer Games

Description

The subset of olympic_athletes from the Paris 2024 Summer Games (year == 2024 & season == "Summer"). A single-Games convenience dataset: small enough that a height vs weight scatterplot shows over-plotting without the multi-hundred-thousand-row scale of the full data, and no filter() is required. Note that bio data (height/weight) is missing for many recent athletes, so roughly a third of rows have complete height and weight. Columns are identical to olympic_athletes.

Usage

olympic_athletes_2024

Format

A data frame with 13,660 rows and 16 variables; see olympic_athletes for the full column descriptions.

Source

See olympic_athletes.

See Also

For the same data a generation earlier (Rome 1960), filter the full data: olympic_athletes |> filter(year == 1960, season == "Summer").

Examples

data(olympic_athletes_2024)
head(olympic_athletes_2024)

Top-10 countries by medals at the Paris 2024 Summer Olympics

Description

A small, tidy summary of the ten countries that won the most total medals at the Paris 2024 Summer Games, in long format with one row per country-and-medal-type. Built for barplot examples: ten ordered categories (rather than the ~90 medal-winning nations in medal_table) plus a medal fill variable, so stacked, dodged, and proportional barplots all read cleanly without any filtering.

Usage

paris_2024_top_medals

Format

A data frame with 30 rows (10 countries x 3 medal types) and 4 variables:

country

Factor. Country/NOC name, levels ordered from the most to the fewest total medals (United States first).

noc

Character. Three-letter IOC code (e.g. "USA", "CHN").

medal

Factor with levels "Gold", "Silver", "Bronze".

count

Integer. Number of that medal type won by that country.

Source

Derived from medal_table (games "2024 Summer").

Examples

data(paris_2024_top_medals)
head(paris_2024_top_medals)

Athlete-event rows per Olympic season, pre-counted

Description

A tiny pre-counted table: one row per Olympic season (Summer/Winter) with the number of athlete-event rows in olympic_athletes for that season. Added so plotting exercises can contrast geom_bar() (counts raw rows for you) with geom_col() (plots pre-counted values) without introducing base R counting code.

Usage

season_counts

Format

A data frame with 2 rows and 2 variables:

season

Factor. "Summer" or "Winter".

n

Integer. Number of athlete-event rows in olympic_athletes for that season.

Source

Derived from olympic_athletes (one count per season).

Examples

data(season_counts)
season_counts

Olympic team-sport athlete-event participations (Basketball, Volleyball, Curling)

Description

The subset of olympic_athletes with sport in Basketball, Volleyball, or Curling: three team sports with contrasting physiques, handy for comparing distributions across groups (boxplots, violins, facets) without first filtering. Columns are identical to olympic_athletes.

Usage

team_sport_athletes

Format

A data frame with 10,912 rows and 16 variables; see olympic_athletes for the full column descriptions.

Source

See olympic_athletes.

Examples

data(team_sport_athletes)
head(team_sport_athletes)

USA Summer Olympics medal-table rows, 1896-2024

Description

The subset of medal_table with noc == "USA" and season == "Summer": one row per Summer Games the USA attended. A convenience dataset for time-series plots of one nation's medal haul without first filtering. Columns are identical to medal_table. Note the USA-boycotted 1980 Moscow Games have no row at all.

Usage

usa_summer_medals

Format

A data frame with 30 rows and 11 variables; see medal_table for the full column descriptions.

Source

See medal_table.

Examples

data(usa_summer_medals)
head(usa_summer_medals)

Olympic volleyball athlete-event participations, 1896-2026

Description

The subset of olympic_athletes with sport == "Volleyball". A convenience dataset so examples can focus on a single sport without first filtering. Columns are identical to olympic_athletes.

Usage

volleyball_athletes

Format

A data frame with 4,792 rows and 16 variables; see olympic_athletes for the full column descriptions.

Source

See olympic_athletes.

Examples

data(volleyball_athletes)
head(volleyball_athletes)