Medal tables of Olympic Games are always popular, but they aggregate a lot of information – especially when it comes to geography. When looking at data, it’s often interesting to go local: that’s why we collected the birth places of all the athletes that have won at least a medal at the 2020 Olympics in Tokyo, and showed them on an interactive map.

Clicking on each medal, a tooltip indicates the name of the athlete, their birth place, the medal(s) that they won, the discipline and the delegation they competed for. By clicking on the medalist’s name the Wikipedia page dedicated to her or him opens, making it possible to access additional details.

Such a map shows at a glance where most medalists come from and which regions are over- or under-represented in the Tokyo Olympics’ medal table. It is also handy for some trivia of course: for instance, Tromsø in Norway is the northernmost place where a medalist was born, while Invercargill in New Zealand is the southernmost one; Carissa Moore from Honolulu (Hawaii) is the medalist who was born the furthest away from any other.

The map and dataset are based on data extracted from Wikipedia and Wikidata. Wikidata currently records the place of birth of about 90 percent of all medalists, so a few athletes are missing. Additional details and data are available here .

This article was updated on 10 August 2021 to account for the final results of the Tokyo Olympics.