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≡ OLYMPEDIA.ORG ≡
It’s nice to know you have a source of information you can absolutely depend on.
In the Olympic world, that has been – and again is – Olympedia.org, now fully updated with Paris 2024 Olympic Games and Gwangju 2024 Winter Youth Olympic Games data.
What can you find?
According to Dr. Bill Mallon (USA), one of the originators of the project and an orthopedic surgeon after a stint on the PGA Tour, and one of the world’s foremost Olympic statisticians:
“The database has 100% complete Olympic results – all years, all sports, all events, including demonstration events, Youth Olympic Games, ancient Olympics. The database includes a bio page for every Olympian along with coaches, referees, and administrators. Each bio page has vital data such as date-of-birth, place-of-both, height andweight, clubs, and each athlete’s full Olympic results.
“The website is fully hyper-linked so you can find anything you need fairly easily. In all, the original database on which the website is based has about 150,000,000 data points.
“It is updated daily and full results after every Olympics as will be the case with Milano-Cortina 2026.”
It’s pretty amazing, and truly indispensable. Among the 16 gigabytes of data, you can find (a small sampling):
● Biographies of “Olympic” horses
● Look-up of Olympians who are related
● Olympians who competed in more than one sport
● Olympians who competed for more than one country
● Head-to-head records of countries in team sports
● Lists of all Olympic venues
● List of all Olympic bid competitions and votes
● Highlights of all 293 editions of the original Olympic Games!
● Lists of athlete births, deaths and events held every day of the year!
● Wild lists, such as Olympians who have been in space (one!)
There are biographies on 174,104 Olympic athletes and 1,630,515 results across 65 Olympic and Winter Games.
The development of this astonishing site began in 1997 with four people beginning the work – Mallon, Arild Gjerde (NOR), David Foster (GBR) and the late Magne Teigen (NOR). They gave their team the perfectly-fitting name of the OlyMADMen, with the emphasis on “mad.” There are more than 30 people now involved, from multiple countries.
The project was sufficient deep to be offered on the statistics site www.Sports-Reference.com by 2007. After a long discussion process with the International Olympic Committee, an agreement was made for the IOC to support it in late 2016 and the Olympedia site was opened to the public in May 2020.
The IOC and the OlyMADMen could not reach an agreement on support terms earlier this year, but this has now been completed and the site is fully updated.
As Mallon has noted, it’s not perfect. But the will to make it better and better is there; if you see something wrong, be sure to use the Feedback form and say so!
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