Weekly Roundup 06.08.25

Alcaraz v Sinner eh? What a final to end a superb French Open. There's been some remarkable tennis on show in both the men's and women's games which bodes well for the next few years.

Onto this week's remarkable show, and I'm starting with Anastasiya who took a look at whether the Monaco GP is as boring as its reputation. This is a textbook example of a slope chart, and Anastasiya's use of colour to highlight drivers who finished higher, lower, or the same as their starting position really elevates the message. To my eye, it looks like the Monaco GP might be relatively interesting most years although 2024 stands out as as a particularly boring year! It would be interesting to see how Monaco compares against the other tracks.

Next up, Whitney took a look at the viewership for Pokemon on Twitch last year (card games are sports). As well as being a really vibrant colour scheme, I particularly like how Whitney has given an option to switch between a log scale and a standard scale. This really improves visibility for a dataset that is dominated by an outlier, which you can see happened here with viewers to the World Championships drowning everything else. Very cool!

Rob Taylor continues his fine series of rugby visualisations with a dive into where the British & Irish Lions have come from in this iteration of the touring team. I really like Rob's clean map style here which allows the red highlights to really pop when you select a club. The comparison of each player is also a neat touch allowing you to see where each player shines inside a talented squad. Great parameter actions too!

Simon Yates recently laid some demons to rest with by winning the Giro d'Italia on the same climb that he famously lost it on in 2018. Scott Barber has graphed Yates' two races to show how this year panned out differently. The Giro inspired colour scheme is a lovely touch, and it's very interesting to see how different the two races were, particularly for Yates himself.

CJ Mayes recently spoke to Tiago Monteiro, the winner of the Chelsea FC's Inisights Vizathon, to understand more about how he crafted his winning entry. That was a fantastic competition and Tiago was a worthy winner. I'm looking forward to hopefully picking up.a few tips myself!

CJ has also been busy experimenting with AI this week and has built a running coach which uses his Strava data to generate insights. AI is going to be a big part of all of our future and this is a good example of the sort of tasks that it will be doing in the future. CJ has also walked through the steps for how he created this model which provides a guide for anyone interested in doing something similar. Let us know if you are experimenting in a similar space too!

I'm going to finish up this week with something a little different from Kirk Goldsberry who has created a compilation of scoring positions for Shai Gilgeous-Alexander. Instead of plotting positional data though, he has created an animation and overlaid all the final shots of SGA. It's very cool, check it out.

And that's it for this week folks! Stay creative :)

Mo & the #SportsVizSunday team