Where do the fastest men in the world come from?
13 September 2015
In track and field; whether at the Olympics or the recent World Championships the same countries / areas always seem to excel at certain events. Americans and Jamaicans win the sprints while East Africans win the distance events.
All Time Athletics contains the top performers in each event, from the Men's 100m to the Women's Heptathlon. I decided to scrape this data and plot some choropleth maps showing better where the top performers were from.
First off I used the python requests and Beautiful Soup libraries to scrape the data and dump it into json files. After this I used DataMaps; a cool D3 library making it really easy to create map visualizations.
The maps below use data of the top 1000 unique performers in the individual event.