Sports Archive:

I guess today is the day of map posts! Here is one from the Economist that shows which countries participated in each summer Olympics since 1896. You can see the stupid 1980/84 boycotts by east and west, for example.

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Olympic Games

In: Interactive Sports

20 Jul 2012

The Guardian has created explanatory infographics for just about every game. Some are better than others. They also have interactive guides to many of the sports. I imagine we’ll see lots of these in the coming weeks.

For example, for beach volleyball. They should have explained the scorekeeping like they did for normal volleyball.

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Interactive guides:

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I like dangerous traditions.

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Age ranges for each sport for the past three summer games.

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(note: I couldn’t get the age filter at the top to work in either firefox or IE)

The medals are mostly won by the young, however:

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An excellent analysis of the players from both teams. The colors map out where shots were taken from, and how accurate they were.

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Interesting scatter plot of service and return performance. Grey dots indicate players already out of the tournament. I don’t like that the top players are indicated with bigger circles – I think a color indicator would have been better, but perhaps the intention was to make them easier to click on? Content wise, it appears that you need both a service and return game to win (which I suppose is no surprise).

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A nice look at how each hole has been modified over the years from Historyshots.

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Author: Alison Hinks.

Yoga

Basketball Courtvision

In: Sports

13 Mar 2012

A beautiful visualization of where NBA players make their shots from. The author, Kirk Goldsberry, even breaks it down by different player positions, and uses it to analyze specific player tendencies. (original paper; via)

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I withhold the snarky pen and simply share this for those who might be interested. (Thanks to Katie Desmond for the link!)

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Ok, can’t resist. Below are the seven chakras of R. Crumb:

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Some interesting facts. Almost makes me want to try it.

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Too funny not to post. As a bonus, on the right, a comparison of nine poses to getting fall-down drunk.

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Sorry about the sidestep into diagram and photo humor – I’ll post some boring econ charts soon to balance it all out for you.