Tracking Titans by Playfair Data

To celebrate the 2024 Summer Olympics in Paris, France, the Playfair Data team created Tracking Titans, a longform infographic that alerted fans and sports media in near real-time when track and field Olympic records were broken. Going into the 2024 events, track and field athletes had set new Olympic records for seven straight Summer Games. With better attire, nutrition, and training habits, did the record-breaking streak continue? Explore Tracking Titans to find out!

The primary data visualization objective of this project was to reflect the data through the symbolism of popular track and field events, including running, shotput, long jumping, and javelin throw. You can see this accomplished right away with the first chart selection, which is a novel unit chart in the form of an oval sprinting track. Other objectives include equally representing performance across genders and alerting viewers when a record was broken, both of which were met with the use of color and 2-D spatial position within the unit chart.

The second novel chart type is a bar chart in the geometric form of a shotput field which was used in a callout to demonstrate that returning athletes set more Olympic records than their first-time counterparts. Lastly, the visualization is rounded out by another novel approach to the bar chart, using the preattentive attributes of 2-D spatial position, height, and length in the form of a javelin throw to illustrate which countries have won the most medals in Summer Olympics history.