Fun With the Major Upcoming Winter Sports Event in Pyeongchang

First, I had to find some suitable raw data. The UK’s Guardian sponsored a project on kaggle which was kept up to date even after the London Games by the community. The provided data contains a data set with the most important metrics for medal winners:

To connect List & Label with this raw data, a CSV data provider is required. As I would like to do some advanced filtering and sorting, I wrap it in an InMemoryDataProvider:

CsvDataProvider rawData = new CsvDataProvider(@"C:\data\WinterSportsEvent\winter.csv", true, "Medals", ';');
InMemoryDataProvider sqlData = new InMemoryDataProvider();
sqlData.AddTable(rawData, "Medals");
using (ListLabel LL = new ListLabel())
{
LL.DataSource = sqlData;
LL.Design();
}

This starts the Designer with the raw data available as a sortable and filterable data source. The rest is easy – just add some crosstabs and enable a drilldown via report parameters. This gives an interactive data browser to answer questions like “Who is Ole Einar Bjørndalen and in which sport did he win his medals?” or “Which country won the second most medals, and when did they win them?”

Fun facts I was able to extract:

• If we assume everyone plays fair, it seems to help a lot if the Games are at your home country (note the peak for the 1992 Turin Games in the Italian medal statistic):

• While Germany (“GER”) just ranks 7^th in the all-time statistic, the combination of GER, the Federal Republic of Germany (“FRG”) and the German Democratic Republic (“GDR”) ranks third just after Canada.
• Talking of Canada, if you want to get a huge number of medals you should pursue team sports like Ice Hockey as they are counted once for each team member at least in this data set.
• Cross-Country Skiing seems to be a great sport for individuals searching to make most medals. From the top 15 athletes, seven are skiing cross-country. But then again, they haven’t had the best press lately.
• If your country is flat like the Netherlands, better get some good skates instead of skis or a snowboard. Corollary: don’t mess with the Netherlands at skating.

We’ve put my playground report online on our free Report Server online demo. Of course, this can easily be done via a couple of REST calls. You will find the corresponding report “Winter Sports Event” under “Report Templates”. It contains several drilldown reports to play with. Enjoy!