Welcome to Olympics at Sports-Reference.com, the latest and greatest Sports Reference site joining its sibling sites Baseball-Reference.com, Basketball-Reference.com, Hockey-Reference.com, and Pro-Football-Reference.com.

On May 21st, Bill Mallon, founder and past president of the International Society of Olympic Historians (ISOH), called me at my home. Prior to that phone call we had no interest and no plans for doing an Olympic history website. After a couple of phone calls among our group — and one look at the database Bill and the other OlyMADMen had put together — we knew we had to give it a try.

The work began: we hammered out an agreement to license their data; we received a copy of their very well-organized database created by OlyMADMan Jeroen Heijmans; Justin Kubatko worked day and night to build all of the pages on the site; and now, seven weeks later (50 days to be exact), the site has launched.

Let’s take a brief tour and see what the site has to offer:

• We not only have every athlete who has ever won an Olympic medal, but every one of the known 110,000+ athletes who has ever participated in the Olympics Games, from Paavo Nurmi and Boris Shakhlin to Sabine Bau and Knut Johannesen. In addition, over 24,000 of the athletes have a brief biographical sketch.
• There are results for each Summer and Winter Games, including the disputed 1906 Summer Games.
• There are summaries for each sport, country, country by sport and country by event. We also have a summary of each sport by Games.
• For each event that has taken place, we have a listing of the medalists for each Games (including all participants) and for all Games.
• The about section includes many details as to how these events and names were compiled and why various choices were made.

Unfortunately we won’t be updating the site during the Beijing Games, as we don’t have the resources to do that. However, we will update the site shortly after the completion of the Games.

But wait, there’s more…

A blogger recently called our football site, “disturbingly comprehensive.” High praise, indeed. We’ve actually only scratched the surface of this database. The database contains complete heat, match, scoring, judging, distances, weights, heights, and more for the majority of events in Olympic history. For example, here are the results from the finals of the 1936 Berlin Games 100m dash:

How about Jesse Owens’s performance in the first round of the same event?

…or Katarina Witt in the 1988 finals program?

…or Nadia Comăneci in the 1976 Women’s All-Around?

All of this and more will find its way onto the site sometime later this summer.

This project has benefited from the work of many tremendous professionals and amateurs (in the Olympic sense of the word). Justin Kubatko, Sports Reference’s VP, is a programmer par excellence who took this project from idea to creation in a ridiculously short amount of time. The OlyMADMen led by Bill Mallon, Arild Gjerde, and Jeroen Heijmans have pored over thousands of documents and spent tens of thousands of hours producing the data you see now and will see as we build out the site. Their work has been impeccable and, as Bill Mallon has said, our groups are kindred spirits.

Well, that’s all for now. Enjoy the Beijing Games, and we hope you’ll stop back often to uncover that little factoid rattling around in the back of your head.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, July 9th, 2008 at 6:42 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.