The Great Olympian Graph - part 3/3

In part 1 of this blogpost series, we created and prepared a dataset with all the modern Olympian medallists from 1896 to 2012. In part 2, we loaded all that data into Neo4j: here's that article. Now, we of course want to do some interesting queries on the dataset, and see if the Graph will yield any interesting insights - as it usually does.

Easy querying - number of sports per Olympic game

Let's start with something easy - doing some counting of the numbers of sports in every game since 1896. Here's how we do that:

//number of sports per game 

match (y:Year)<--(e:Event)-->(d:Discipline)-->(s:Sport) 

with distinct y.name as game, s.name as sport 

return game, count(sport)order by game ASC

Then you can see that the number of sports has not really changed that dramatically over the years: In the early days we immediately went from 9 sports at the first Olympic game in 1896, to 19 in 1900.

The Great Olympian Graph - part 2/3

In the previous blogpost of this Olympic series I explained how I got to the dataset in 4 distinct .csv files that get generated from a 4-worksheet Google Spreadsheet. Here are the links to the 4 sheets:

• The Countries sheet, including the country codes
• The Cities sheet, mapped to the countries
• The Sports Taxonomy sheet, with the sports and disciplines
• and finally: The Medallists sheet.

Now, in order to load that data into Neo4j, I had to come up with a meaningful graph model.

The Great Olympian Graph - part 1/3

After my previous experiments with some sports data (most recently, the Tour de France 2016 results) in Neo4j, I recently saw the 2016 Olympic games coming up, and thought: well, there MUST be some interesting datasets to find around that - especially now that one of my favourite bike-riders in the world, Greg Van Avermaet, won the Gold Medal in the Cycling Road Race. Still so excited!!!




I did a bit of research and decided to settle on a combination of two datasets:
Just before the London Olympics in 2012,

• The Guardian publlshed a list of all summer Olympic medallists, from 1896 to 2008
• Just after the same 2012 games, The Guardian also published the list of the 2012 medallists