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olympicAthletes

A tidy R data package covering every athlete-event participation in the modern Olympic Games, Athens 1896 through Milano-Cortina 2026 — about 315,000 rows.

Installation 

# from GitHub:
# install.packages("remotes")
remotes::install_github("moderndive/olympicAthletes")

Datasets 

library(olympicAthletes)

data(olympic_athletes)   # ~315,000 athlete-event rows, 1896-2026
data(medal_table)        # verified medal table for every edition, 1896-2026
data(editions)           # metadata for every Games, 1896-2026

# Convenience subsets of olympic_athletes (same 16 columns)
data(athletics_athletes)       # sport == "Athletics"
data(gymnastics_athletes)      # sport == "Gymnastics"
data(basketball_athletes)      # sport == "Basketball"
data(volleyball_athletes)      # sport == "Volleyball"
data(curling_athletes)         # sport == "Curling"
data(olympic_athletes_2024)    # Paris 2024 Summer Games only
data(team_sport_athletes)      # Basketball + Volleyball + Curling
data(art_competitions_athletes)  # the 1912-1948 Art Competitions entrants
data(usa_summer_medals)        # medal_table rows: USA at each Summer Games

# Pre-counted summaries for plotting examples
data(paris_2024_top_medals)    # top-10 countries x Gold/Silver/Bronze (long format)
data(season_counts)            # athlete-event rows per season (2 rows)

?olympic_athletes
Dataset Rows Description
olympic_athletes 315,094 One row per (athlete, Games, event). 16 columns.
medal_table 1,929 One row per (Games, NOC) with Gold/Silver/Bronze counts.
editions 62 Year, season, host city, dates, participant counts. Includes cancelled Games.
athletics_athletes 43,062 Subset of olympic_athletes where sport == "Athletics".
gymnastics_athletes 29,413 Subset where sport == "Gymnastics".
basketball_athletes 5,159 Subset where sport == "Basketball".
volleyball_athletes 4,792 Subset where sport == "Volleyball".
curling_athletes 961 Subset where sport == "Curling".
olympic_athletes_2024 13,660 Subset where year == 2024 & season == "Summer" (Paris 2024).
team_sport_athletes 10,912 Subset where sport is Basketball, Volleyball, or Curling.
art_competitions_athletes 3,578 Subset where sport == "Art Competitions" (1912–1948).
usa_summer_medals 30 medal_table rows for the USA at each Summer Games attended.
paris_2024_top_medals 30 Top-10 countries by total medals at Paris 2024, long format (country, noc, medal, count). For barplot examples.
season_counts 2 Athlete-event rows per season (Summer/Winter), pre-counted for geom_col() examples.

olympic_athletes extends the original rgriff23/Olympic_history dataset. Column names are lowercase snake_case (e.g. noc, medal) rather than the upstream TitleCase, and the host-city column has been split into city_local_latin and city_english. city_local_latin always uses the Latin alphabet — non-Latin-script cities are romanized ("Moskva", "Tokyo", "Beijing", "PyeongChang"), not rendered in their native script.

Provenance

Rows for 1896-2016 come from the rgriff23 dataset (originally scraped from sports-reference.com). Rows for 2018-2026 were scraped from olympedia.org using the pipeline in the olympic-moderndive-data repository. See data-raw/DATASET.R for the reproducible build.

Caveats

  • Medal counts are per-player, not per-team-event. A team gold (e.g. Ice Hockey Men) produces one medal = "Gold" row per roster member. Group by medal and noc and divide team-event medals by team size to reproduce the IOC medal table — or use the medal_table companion dataset which uses the IOC convention.
  • Bio coverage: as of the v0.4.0 bio refresh, age is ~100% complete for all five 2018-2026 editions. height/weight coverage ranges from 96%/93% for 2018 Winter down to 34%/29% for Paris 2024 — highest for Winter team sports (Ice Hockey rosters are near-complete on olympedia) and lowest for the largest, most-recent Summer Games, where olympedia simply hasn’t published measurements for many athletes — same pattern as in the original 1896-2016 source.

License

CC BY 4.0. Please cite this package, the rgriff23 source, and Olympedia.

Citation

Run citation("olympicAthletes") for citations that always reflect your installed package version. It renders three entries — the package itself plus its two upstream data sources:

Ismay C (2026). olympicAthletes: Olympic Athlete Event Data, Athens
1896 to Milano-Cortina 2026. R package version 0.5.9,
<https://moderndive.github.io/olympicAthletes/>.

Griffin R (2018). "Olympic history: longitudinal data scraped from
sports-reference.com." <https://github.com/rgriff23/Olympic_history>.

OlyMADMen (2026). "Olympedia." <https://www.olympedia.org/>.