Olympic athlete-event participations, 1896-2026 — olympic

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)
#>      id                       name sex age height weight          team noc
#> 1 12068       Arthur Charles Blake   M  24     NA     NA United States USA
#> 2 35094             Angelos Fetsis   M  NA     NA     NA        Greece GRE
#> 3 35698 Edwin Harold "Teddy" Flack   M  22     NA     NA     Australia AUS
#> 4 38123                 Carl Galle   M  23    154     45       Germany GER
#> 5 41160       Dimitrios P. Golemis   M  21     NA     NA        Greece GRE
#> 6 57441  Konstantinos Karakatsanis   M  NA     NA     NA        Greece GRE
#>         games year season city_local_latin city_english     sport
#> 1 1896 Summer 1896 Summer           Athína       Athens Athletics
#> 2 1896 Summer 1896 Summer           Athína       Athens Athletics
#> 3 1896 Summer 1896 Summer           Athína       Athens Athletics
#> 4 1896 Summer 1896 Summer           Athína       Athens Athletics
#> 5 1896 Summer 1896 Summer           Athína       Athens Athletics
#> 6 1896 Summer 1896 Summer           Athína       Athens Athletics
#>                          event  medal
#> 1 Athletics Men's 1,500 metres Silver
#> 2 Athletics Men's 1,500 metres   <NA>
#> 3 Athletics Men's 1,500 metres   Gold
#> 4 Athletics Men's 1,500 metres   <NA>
#> 5 Athletics Men's 1,500 metres   <NA>
#> 6 Athletics Men's 1,500 metres   <NA>
table(olympic_athletes$year, olympic_athletes$season)
#>       
#>        Summer Winter
#>   1896    380      0
#>   1900   1936      0
#>   1904   1301      0
#>   1906   1733      0
#>   1908   3101      0
#>   1912   4040      0
#>   1920   4292      0
#>   1924   5233    460
#>   1928   4992    582
#>   1932   2969    352
#>   1936   6506    895
#>   1948   6405   1075
#>   1952   8270   1088
#>   1956   5127   1307
#>   1960   8119   1116
#>   1964   7702   1778
#>   1968   8588   1891
#>   1972  10304   1655
#>   1976   8641   1861
#>   1980   7191   1746
#>   1984   9454   2134
#>   1988  12037   2639
#>   1992  12977   3436
#>   1994      0   3160
#>   1996  13780      0
#>   1998      0   3605
#>   2000  13821      0
#>   2002      0   4109
#>   2004  13443      0
#>   2006      0   4382
#>   2008  13602      0
#>   2010      0   4402
#>   2012  12920      0
#>   2014      0   4891
#>   2016  13688      0
#>   2018      0   5119
#>   2020  14535      0
#>   2022      0   5249
#>   2024  13660      0
#>   2026      0   5415

# Top medal-winning NOCs at Paris 2024 (one row per athlete-medal)
library(dplyr)
#> 
#> Attaching package: ‘dplyr’
#> The following objects are masked from ‘package:stats’:
#> 
#>     filter, lag
#> The following objects are masked from ‘package:base’:
#> 
#>     intersect, setdiff, setequal, union
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))
#> # A tibble: 92 × 4
#>    noc   Bronze  Gold Silver
#>    <chr>  <int> <int>  <int>
#>  1 USA       73    76     46
#>  2 FRA       16    40     85
#>  3 CHN       20    24     38
#>  4 GER       25     7     44
#>  5 NED       23    43      3
#>  6 AUS       22    14     29
#>  7 ESP       20    38      3
#>  8 BRA       21     2     29
#>  9 DEN       19    18      1
#> 10 ITA       12    20      6
#> # ℹ 82 more rows