.png)
It was London Marathon day today and I had the pleasure of cheering on thousands of people (and a couple of very hardy friends) as they undertook that massive sporting challenge. It's a wonderful event for a whole host of reasons and one of the things that I love is that encompasses all the levels of sporting activity - from the world's elite and competitive club runners all the way through to people who had never run before they started training this time around. It's an interesting reminder that while competitive sport is very engaging, there are many reasons that people choose sporting activities and they are all as valid as each other.
I'm going to start the roundup this week with Rob Taylor's Clash of the Titans. In this visualisation, Rob looks at the two careers of Dan Carter and Jonny Wilkinson - two of the greatest players in their position in Rugby Union. I really like the monochrome approach that Rob has taken here particularly because it reflects the black and white jerseys that Carter & Wilkinson wore while representing their countries. Very appropriate and deliberate design choices!
(Also a big congratulations to Rob on his Notable Newbie vizzie nomination! I saw a few names familiar to these digital pages across all the categories and everyone who was nominated deserves a massive round of applause for the incredible visualisations you do!).
Turning now to something from LinkedIn, Morgan Rennie has hooked up to Strava to build a remarkable dashboard combining Tableau's interactivity with graphics made in Figma. There's lots to see in here and it also acts as a great example of how far you can go if you mix some of Tableau's features with other things to enhance the insight and storytelling.
As I was writing this blog, I came across DataVizMich's very timely analysis of the London marathon times. I'm always fascinated by the spikes of athletes finishing just ahead of various timing milestones! I also like Mich's split of finish time by pacing of the second half to the first.
Sticking with marathons, Brett2point0 was visualising the Boston marathon which took place last week. As Brett points out, there is quite a noticeable trend through the 20th century and he's mentioned a few things which are undoubtedly part of that trend.
Aside from the running, there a few people on Twitter/X taking part in the #30DayChartChallenge, and I've seen some great sporting vizzes too. One that really stood out to me was Joe Shaw's heatmap showing the points tallies at the end of the Premier League seasons. This is such a great use of a heatmap and, as Joe notes, the Man City v Liverpool rivalry really stands out, as well as some of the more infamous performances at the other end of the table...
And I'm also going to shout out Georgios Karamanis who is using the Olympic & Paralympic Games as the basis for each visualisation of his #30DayChartChallenge. All Georgios' vizzes are well crafted around a single stat which often hasn't been given the airtime it deserves, and they are beautifully coloured too! This is his most recent one and I recommend going to his channel and looking back across all of them.
And it wouldn't be a roundup without CJ Mayes showing us to achieve the previously unachievable. This week, CJ is using Selenium to scrape dart-by-dart result data. As always, well worth a read (and I look forward to seeing what magic he can weave with this data too).
And that's the lot for this week! As always, thanks to all our contributors and keeeeeeeep vizzing!
Mo & the #SportsVizSunday team