Arts in the Age of Data: Funding and Olympic Success

If we want to challenge and disrupt long-held assumptions about the world around us, we increasingly need to tell our stories through data and reveal the limits of other people’s numbers. With this in mind, Bristol Liberal Arts students take the Arts in the Age of Data unit in their second year, which empowers us to become critical citizens in this digital age.

During the unit, we work in teams to apply quantitative research methods to topics that matter to us. In a series of blog posts, we will be displaying some of the outputs of these data projects.Below George Dillon-Robinson, Isabella Kateley and Martha Tipper present their infographic on the relationship between Olympic success and funding.

Our interest in the Olympic Games and the funding behind specific sports derived from watching the Olympic Games, particularly the London 2012 Olympic Games. We were fortunate enough to watch the athletics at the Olympic and Paralympic Games, meaning that we all had a shared experience, which, coupled with our general interest in sport, meant that this was an ideal topic to explore.

When watching, we noticed that Team GB did noticeably well in rowing and cycling. We were, then, curious to find out if this was related to the funding they received or another factor. This led to the creation of our infographic question of the relationship between Olympic success and funding.

In this infographic, we question the definition of success, notably medal totals and participation levels. With our statistic of “Cost per Medal” we could compare success both sport by sport and from Olympics to Olympics for Team GB. We concluded that funding has a strong impact on Olympic success with sports that received more funding winning more medals.

By George Dillon-Robinson, Isabella Kateley and Martha Tipper