Hi! If you’re new here, this is Map Nerd. We explore amazing places and cool things on maps, usually with a video story + quick digestible info. If you enjoy it, subscribe and you can explore with us!
In This Issue:
Best of Olympic Maps:New Zealand’s snub, first-time winners, & athletes from your hometown
The Olympics explained in maps and maps that explain the Olympics…
Yes, yes, I know the Olympics ended 10 days ago. But the maps are just starting to spread! So here is a round-up of the best Olympic-themed maps. Enjoy…
📍1) 5 Nations Won Their First Olympic Medal This Year!
📍2) Olympic Winners By State
📍3) All-Time Medals Cartogram
📍4) New Zealand Snubbed at the Closing Ceremony!
📍5) LA Olympics 1932 > 1984 > 2028
📍 5 Nations Won Their First Olympic Medal This Year! 🇱🇨 🇩🇲 🇦🇱 🇨🇻
Several maps like this have been making the rounds, but this one is the best imo: From Austin news station KXAN’s Data Hub comes a great interactive map that shows the best medals won by each country (more specifically, medals won by each National Olympic Committee, since a few NOC’s aren’t necessarily full-blown countries and vice-versa, like the Refugee Olympic Team). I can’t embed the interactive version here, but clicking on the image will get you there. The key takeaways are:
5 NOCs won their first-ever medal at the 2024 Paris games:
Saint Lucia 🇱🇨 (they won 2 medals this year actually, including a gold in women’s 100m & silver in women’s 200m - both won by the same athlete Julien Alfred)
Dominica 🇩🇲 (their first medal ever was a gold! in women’s triple jump)
Albania 🇦🇱(they also won 2 medals: both bronzes in men’s wrestling)
Cabo Verde 🇨🇻 (a bronze in men’s boxing)
Refugee Olympic Team (bronze in women’s boxing won by Cameroonian refugee Cindy Ngamba)
2 NOCs won their first gold at the 2024 Paris Games:
Guatemala 🇬🇹 (women’s trap shooting)
Botswana 🇧🇼 (men’s 200m)
(in addition to Saint Lucia & Dominica, who each also won gold in their first medal-winning games ever)
Nearly 70 NOCs have never won a medal
This is a difficult number to pin down exactly because countries, and NOCs, change over time: some have just started to compete (like South Sudan and Timor-Leste) while others no longer exist (like Yugoslavia and U.S.S.R.). The most oft-cited estimation is “nearly 70.”
Here’s a series of fun maps that give us insight into where US Olympians come from. An important caveat to interpreting these is that it’s not entirely clear what any of these maps are using to qualify an athlete as “from” a particular state - whether they’re born there, or trained there, or just voluntarily self-identified with that state. Nonetheless, it is intriguing!
🏅 Most Medals per Capita: According to this map from The Washington Post, Alaska and Montana blow away the competition with a whopping 0.00000409 and 0.00000353 medals per capita, respectively. “Whopping” may be a bit of an overstatement, but the every other state’s haul is from 0 to 0.0000019, so Alaska and Montana definitely take the cake…
Most medals per capita by state by The Washington Post (via Newsweek). Click on the image for interactive version.
🏅 Summer Golds Per State: Of course the most populous states boast the most gold medals: California, New York, Texas. Though there’s a few that punch above their weight: Hawaii, Oregon, Maryland, Alabama…
🏅 Qualifiers By State: Everyone who qualified for Team USA, broken down by state. The standout overachievers: Colorado, Connecticut, Vermont (3 from a population of 650K is pretty damn good!). And shout out to Wyoming and North Dakota, who didn’t have anyone make the cut this year - you’ll get em next time! (The interactive version lists all the athletes if you’re curious - you can get there by clicking here),
“Where Team USA is From” by TeamUSA.com. Click on image for interactive version.
🏅 What Olympian has ties to your hometown? Click on this interactive map from NBC5 Chicago, which gets into the deets about each athlete’s roots: their hometown, school, and current residence. Find out if any Olympians have ties to your home!…
Which Olympian’s have ties to your hometown? by NBC5. Clicking on the image for interactive version.
📍 All-Time Medals Cartogram 🌎🌍🌏
This type of map is called a cartogram, and it’s my fav :) A cartogram proportionally sizes areas based on a particular stat. In this case, the stat is the number of Olympic medals won by each country from 1896-2012 (Note that does not include more recent games, and unfortunately it doesn’t look like the guy who made this has updated it in a while). Cartograms like this give a unique perspective to view data that can otherwise be warped by the absolute size or location of a place (ie how many times have you overlooked Hawaii and Rhode Island in a map?).
📍 New Zealand Snubbed at the Closing Ceremony! 🇳🇿🇳🇿🇳🇿
Perhaps the most mappy of map stories to come out of the Paris games was this: the stage at the closing ceremony depicted a map of the world… without New Zealand. In all fairness, the stage, which I think looked pretty neat, was an intentionally very abstract version of the world. It’s not like every world place was accounted for except New Zealand (ehem: Hawaii?, Korea?, Antarctica?). Still, Kiwis enjoyed poking fun at the mishap: according to local news, some argued the country was in fact there “in the form of a conveniently located speaker/camera block thingy.”
Lastly, the next summer games will be in Los Angeles in 2028. That will put LA in the very select club of three-time host cities, along with London and Paris. Looking forward to the festivities, here’s a snapshot of what the LA Olympic map has looked like through the ages…
1932 LA Olympics: if you zoom in by the “Marathon Course,” you will notice a poorly named lake near Gardena that no longer exists.
1984 LA Olympics: They got cutesy in 1984 with a bald eagle Uncle Sam in a bowtie. Interestingly, and probably a direct response to the time in which the games took place, the famous Watts Towers (“Simon Rodia Towers”) is prominently called out though there’s not many other landmarks.
2028 LA Olympics (aka “LA28”): This is the layout of the current plan, though there’s plenty of time to move things around (in fact, the canoe/kayak events were moved to Oklahoma just a few months ago)!
Why is Olympic surfing in Tahiti, 10,000 miles away from Paris? Because its legendary. And its French.
To back up for a sec: Tahiti is the largest island of French Polynesia, which is a collection of about 120 islands in the south pacific that are officially considered an Overseas Country of France.
Tahiti & French Polynesia
What does “Overseas Country” mean? Basically it means that Tahiti operates mostly autonomously with its own government, laws, and political parties. But France controls defense and foreign affairs, and the head of state is the President of France. Tahitians are French citizens and vice-versa. So, despite being 10,000 miles away, these are still French waters.
Now, why this spot specifically? Because of this thing.
Real photo of the Teahupo’o wave
This is the Teahupo’o wave. It is legendary in the world of surfing. It breaks off the coast of a small village on the remote southeastern part of the island. The road actually ends here – you have to take a boat to get to villages further south. The town of about 1500 people can’t host everything that comes with the Olympics so many of the teams are actually staying on a cruise ship nearby.
Teahupo’o, Tahiti is literally at the end of the road!
Before the 90s, the wave was considered un-surfable. More started attempting it and the wave became a part of the Pro Surfing Tour in ‘99. Even then, in 2016, it was taken off the women’s tour because it was considered too dangerous and only just reinstated in 2022. The wave actually breaks a couple hundred feet off-shore. That’s why the athletes waiting to compete are stationed in boats and the judge’s tower is built atop stilts in the water.
A Nation of Less Than 1 Million Were Unbeaten Olympic Champions… Until This Year.
Watch the Video Below!
I love the Olympics but this year’s Parade of Nations left out one of the best parts: the nations! There are 206 countries that carried their flag down the river on Friday, and for many of them this is one of very few times they get international attention.
So, if the Olympics won’t give them what they deserve, I will!
Prior to Saturday only one nation has won gold in rugby sevens since the sport’s debut in 2016. That would be Fiji.
Fiji's Men's & Women's National Rugby Teams
You probably know Fiji as a spot for luxurious vacations and luxurious bottled water, but yes it is also a rugby powerhouse! Rugby is the national sport here. About 10% of the entire population are registered players, and their top athletes play overseas.
The country comprises more than 330 islands but almost all of its 900,000 people live on the two largest, which are about 3 hours by plane from New Zealand, and 10 hours from Los Angeles
Fiji
As for the luxurious bottled water: yes it does actually come from an aquifer in Fiji. Whether that justifies its price, I’ll leave up to you.
Why are there women on Afghanistan’s Olympic Team?
Afghanistan Olympic Team at the 2024 Olympics
This weekend’s road race featured two female cyclists - who are actually sisters - racing under the flag of Afghanistan (actually, the former flag of Afghanistan – not the Taliban’s flag). They’re joined by a female sprinter and 3 men who are representing the country at the 2024 Olympics.
Afghan female cyclist at the 2024 Olympics
Believe it or not, Afghanistan has been competing in the Olympics since 1936. But, the current Taliban regime does not allow women to participate in sports and is banned by the International Olympic Committee.
Afghan Olympic delegation circa 1930
Instead, The IOC worked with the Afghan Olympic Committee in exile and built a gender-balanced team of 3 men and 3 women with thier pre-2021 flag. Only 1 of the athletes lives in Afghanistan (the Judoka). The IOC was able to do all this with Universality Places, a rule which reserves spots for small teams from underrepresented countries.
2024 Afghanistan Olympic Team (from top to bottom): cyclists Fariba & Yulduz Hashimi, swimmer Fahim Anwari, sprinter Kamia Yousufi, sprinter Sha Mahmood Noor Zahi, judoka Mohammad Samim Faizad.
There are an additional five Afghan athletes who are competing under the banner of the Refugee Olympic Team, which has 37 athletes born in 11 nations they can not return to.
The Taliban only recognizes the 3 men as the team, and has made no mention of the sister cyclists or sprinter Kimia Yousofi, who ended her run with this message to the world:
🚨🚨 UPDATE: After this video story posted (well, actually, on the day it was posted), an Afghan athlete hit the headlines. Breakdancer Manizha Talash, who was part of the Olympic Refugee Team, wore a cape to her match that read “FREE AFGHAN WOMEN.” She was disqualified from the competition, but her message was clear.
