Putting our Team GB medal winners on the map
I’m sure most of us are glued to our television screens, laptops and radios at the moment as we support Team GB. Here at Ordnance Survey head office, our minds inevitably turned to mapping – and we wondered where our athletes came from, and whether there were hotspots around the country that produce medal-winning people.
So, we created a ‘medal map‘ using OS OpenSpace. The idea is that whenever a member of Team GB wins a medal, we will place a marker in their home town* (their place of birth as identified on the Team GB website, and not their specific address, we don’t want people clamouring at doors to see their medal!), as identified by the official Team GB media information. You can see the example below for Heather Stanning, part of the women’s pairs team that won our first gold medal.
As you can see, for team events, we will be highlighting each member of the team. We’ll update the medal map each weekday morning to reflect medals won the previous day.
Take a look at our medal map and see if there any medal winners clustered in your area – perhaps it will inspire you to take up a new sport!
If you haven’t come across it before, OS OpenSpace is a free service that allows you to embed our maps, covering the whole of Great Britain, into your web applications, if they are free to consumers. OS OpenSpace uses our JavaScript application programming interface (API) and does not include any advertising in the maps.
*If an athlete is born outside Great Britain (that includes Northern Ireland), we put our marker in the town in which they currently live, rather than the town where they were born. If the athlete also lives outside Great Britain, we place the marker in the place they won their medal. This is because we only have mapping data for Great Britain, not the United Kingdom.
Themocracy
Oh come on for pity sake. Excellent but it’s UK and NI. Three medals from Coleraine NI this morning and you can’t do that?. #nationalmappingagency
Hi Andrew – you’re right Team GB is Great Britain and Northern Ireland – but we’re the national mapping agency for Great Britain and our data doesn’t cover Northern Ireland. Don’t worry though, athletes from Northern Ireland are still on the map. In the case of the Chambers brothers, who are on the map after yesterday’s success, rather than their place of birth being added to the map, it’s their current place of residence. As an aside, there are also Team GB members born outside the wider UK (such as Bradley Wiggins), who we are pinning to the map in the same way.
Hi Andrew, Great point – and the omission / inability is ridiculous!
Gemma, might I suggest you use Google Fusion tables, Google maps cover all of the UK and is easy to update so you would not have to wait until Monday for your engineers to update it..
Hi Ed, thanks for the comment. It’s nice and simple for us to update OS OpenSpace with the info, it’s more the web-publishing process, so we agreed we’d stick to Monday to Friday updates to avoid any problems.
Erm Ed, I you sure you understand the point of the Ordnance Survey?
Sorry for the typo, distracted by small child.
*Are you sure*…etc
Yes Dave, I believe I do.. making quite nice maps !
Thanks Gemma for creating this. Love seeing the map fill up. Inspire a nation, Go Team GB!
What I’m very puzzled about is why the map is set up so we can’t see the whole of Great Britain at once.
I thought the only places producing any medals were London and the North West – until I moved it slightly and noticed the golds coming from the Central Belt of Scotland and the SouthWest.
Surely the “zoom out” scale should include the whole of GB?
Thanks for the feedback, OS OpenSpace can be set to show the whole GB, we just chose to bring the zoom in to make some medals instantly visible. But we’ll certainly keep it in mind for our next OS OpenSpace map we share.
Agree, seems bizare that the zoom is set to prevent viewing the whole of GB in one go.
This is great except I can only see the pins and not the map. I think you need a little more bandwidth on your servers.
Hi John – sorry to hear you’re having trouble viewing it at the moment. We’re not experiencing any issues with our website or experiencing an unusual number of visitors. We have tested in a number of browsers, but if you let me know how you’re trying to view it, I can try to find out if it should be working for you.
Not to worry it appears to be working now, it was on my iPad on the tube heading into the City earlier, may be just slow 3G.
Thanks for providing this, it’s interesting. I notice all the medal winners near me (in Ealing W5) seem to be the rowers, not surprising really given we’re a short walk from the Thames.
PS: Huge fan of the OS, keep up the good work.
I was after just such a map. Very interesting. I didn’t realize that so many of our medal winners were born overseas.
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As others have pointed out it’s a shame that you haven’t included all 4 home nations on your map – reflecting the fact that Team GB covers GB and NI. The Coleraine rowers – and, hopefully, the hockey players who will become medallists – deserve recognition. Your jobs-worth reason that you only map GB is silly. Team GB includes Northern Ireland. I’d suggest you do the job that you’ve started correctly or not at all.
I think it’s a little unfair to call it a “job’s worth” answer, the Ordnance Survey does not cover Ireland, including the northerns part. Since this is their web site and their map how can they display Team GB members in Northern Ireland? If you’re that bothered I suggest you map the same data on Google or Open Street Map.
I would agree however that the default should include the the whole of Great Britain, perhaps they could at least change that.
Cool. It would be even cooler if we could see the truly global scope of Team GB – with medalists born in Johannesburg, Mogadishu, Seattle, Ghent and Germany
Interesting map, but where is Sarks Carl Hester? With lots of talk on the web about how Team GB is made up of four nations it would be good to show how many nations (and medal winners) actually compete in Team GB, NI and Crown Dependencies.
Congratulations, Peter Kennaugh.
Hi Phil – every medal-winning athlete is added to the map, so Carl is one of the athletes that we’ve added to the map by the place he currently lives (Newent, Gloucestershire) rather then birthplace.
Nice map! Did you know that the first known maps were of the heavens rather than of Earth? We think Olympians are stars!! We’re showing our love to them by producing these daily rap videos by the great artist Testament. Check them out! http://bit.ly/olmVd
Are they all there? Gerraint Thomas is born and still lives in Cardiff. The gold winning pursuit team trains in Newport (as well as Manchester) yet I can’t see him on the map
Found him… Much easier to use the list of medalists than the actual map
Hi James – yes, he is on there. As we have two medal winners from Cardiff, you just need to zoom in more on the map to see them individually.
Thanks Gemma, just spotted the “*If an athlete is born outside Great Britain (that includes Northern Ireland), we put our marker in the town in which they currently live”, which obviously includes Sark.
Found him now, as has been said, easier to find by medallist than by map.
Nice map!
One minor quibble though. The silver medals don’t stand out enough from the map. I would suggest a black ring around each medal for contrast.
Do the OS know by any chance the location of the Golden Postboxes, I’d love to know where the ones close to me are.
Thanks,
We haven’t been mapping those John, so I’m not sure. I’d suggest the Royal Mail website as the best place to start, I’m sure they’ll have either a map of golden postboxes or a list of addresses.
Thanks, you’re right, I even found a web site dedicated to the task: http://www.goldpostboxes.com. I think you need an OS version too though.
http://www.goldpostboxes.com/
[...] Team GB medal winners on a map – to put Yorkshire related arguments to rest [...]
Go Team England!
Very interesting that using old traditional boundaries (as Yorkshire are doing) – Lancashire (Manchester, Liverpool & current Lancs) has 7 golds! But not a whisper!!
And that London is also not far behind.
[...] [...]
Great work thank you my man.
I don’t get this – the position of gold medals on the OS map differs slightly from the location of gold postboxes on the Royal Mail Goldpostboxes site. For example, no medal in Nailsworth, Glos on the OS map but there is very a gold post box there!
Is there a difference between where an athlete is ‘based’ as opposed to where they actually call ‘home’? Home is surely more important?
Also, despite being explained in the text above, I don’t think place of birth really is as important as an athlete’s real ‘home’. In this respect the Goldpostboxes map is a bit more realistic in terms of boosting an area’s claim to a medal hoard. Gloucestershire hasn’t done too badly for a county of its population size. Yorkshire*, pop 5 million+ 6 Golds, Gloucestershire*, pop 850,000, 4 Golds
* as ceremonial counties
In your entry for Peter Wilson, born in Sherborne, you have spelt the name of the town wrongly. A pity, because the correct spelling is on the map for all to see!
Oh dear, well spotted, we’ve amended that now. Thanks for letting us know.