Men’s 100m Dash Over 100 Years

This was a very fun and interesting graphic to make! What you are looking at here is the full distribution of all running times in all heats at the Olympics for the past 100 years. At the beginning of the project we initially were focusing on the medal winners, assuming they had the fastest times. As you can see on this graph, the gold medal (yellow dot) is not always the fastest time. Why? Well, it’s likely that they or someone else ran a faster time during a qualifying round.

What is most interesting about this visual that I created is seeing the entire distribution moving down together as most of the runners get faster as time goes on. The points on the graph where there is a significant slowing of speed is due to a major historical event. World War II and the banning of PEDs.

My next step will be to create a model attempting to predict medal winners in the future.