Olympic Athlete Event Data, Athens 1896 to Milano-Cortina 2026

A tidy, long-format dataset of every athlete-event participation in the modern Olympic Games, spanning Athens 1896 through Milano-Cortina 2026 (about 315,000 rows). Extends the rgriff23 'Olympic_history' dataset (1896-2016) with five additional editions scraped from Olympedia (< https://www.olympedia.org>): PyeongChang 2018, Tokyo 2020, Beijing 2022, Paris 2024, and Milano-Cortina 2026. Companion datasets cover edition-level metadata and verified medal tables for every edition from 1896 to 2026.

olympicAthletes

A tidy R data package covering every athlete-event participation in the modern Olympic Games, Athens 1896 through Milano-Cortina 2026 — about 315,000 rows.

Installation

# from GitHub:
# install.packages("remotes")
remotes::install_github("moderndive/olympicAthletes")

Datasets

library(olympicAthletes)

data(olympic_athletes)   # ~315,000 athlete-event rows, 1896-2026
data(medal_table)        # verified medal table for every edition, 1896-2026
data(editions)           # metadata for every Games, 1896-2026

# Convenience subsets of olympic_athletes (same 16 columns)
data(athletics_athletes)       # sport == "Athletics"
data(gymnastics_athletes)      # sport == "Gymnastics"
data(basketball_athletes)      # sport == "Basketball"
data(volleyball_athletes)      # sport == "Volleyball"
data(curling_athletes)         # sport == "Curling"
data(olympic_athletes_2024)    # Paris 2024 Summer Games only
data(team_sport_athletes)      # Basketball + Volleyball + Curling
data(art_competitions_athletes)  # the 1912-1948 Art Competitions entrants
data(usa_summer_medals)        # medal_table rows: USA at each Summer Games

# Pre-counted summaries for plotting examples
data(paris_2024_top_medals)    # top-10 countries x Gold/Silver/Bronze (long format)
data(season_counts)            # athlete-event rows per season (2 rows)

?olympic_athletes

olympic_athletes extends the original rgriff23/Olympic_history dataset. Column names are lowercase snake_case (e.g. noc, medal) rather than the upstream TitleCase, and the host-city column has been split into city_local_latin and city_english. city_local_latin always uses the Latin alphabet — non-Latin-script cities are romanized ("Moskva", "Tokyo", "Beijing", "PyeongChang"), not rendered in their native script.

Provenance

Rows for 1896-2016 come from the rgriff23 dataset (originally scraped from sports-reference.com). Rows for 2018-2026 were scraped from olympedia.org using the pipeline in the olympic-moderndive-data repository. See data-raw/DATASET.R for the reproducible build.

Caveats

• Medal counts are per-player, not per-team-event. A team gold (e.g. Ice Hockey Men) produces one medal = "Gold" row per roster member. Group by medal and noc and divide team-event medals by team size to reproduce the IOC medal table — or use the medal_table companion dataset which uses the IOC convention.
• Bio coverage: as of the v0.4.0 bio refresh, age is ~100% complete for all five 2018-2026 editions. height/weight coverage ranges from ~96%/~93% for 2018 Winter down to ~34%/~29% for Paris 2024 — highest for Winter team sports (Ice Hockey rosters are near-complete on olympedia) and lowest for the largest, most-recent Summer Games, where olympedia simply hasn't published measurements for many athletes — same pattern as in the original 1896-2016 source.

License

CC BY 4.0. Please cite this package, the rgriff23 source, and Olympedia.

Citation

Run citation("olympicAthletes") for citations that always reflect your installed package version. It renders three entries — the package itself plus its two upstream data sources:

Ismay C (2026). olympicAthletes: Olympic Athlete Event Data, Athens
1896 to Milano-Cortina 2026. R package version 0.5.9,
<https://moderndive.github.io/olympicAthletes/>.

Griffin R (2018). "Olympic history: longitudinal data scraped from
sports-reference.com." <https://github.com/rgriff23/Olympic_history>.

OlyMADMen (2026). "Olympedia." <https://www.olympedia.org/>.