From the creator (not me)
!! ATTENTION !! Not all disciplines are shown, as only 5,148 out of 11,000+ athletes have their height information available on the official Olympics website. Hopefully, they will update the info eventually, as height plays a major role in disciplines such as rowing, weightlifting, and gymnastics. Data is from Kaggle, which seems webscraped from the official olympics website. Done in R, code can be found on my github. The y axis has been sorted by MEDIAN height, men and women combined.
Interesting that men’s basketball appears to have two nearly equal peaks in height distribution, with a noticeable dip in between.
What’s up with basketball, tennis, and sport climbing being equally bimodal for both sexes? I’m assuming that there are height advantages for different positions in basketball, but no idea what’s up with tennis or climbing. Maybe the latter two are the outcome of an interaction effect where tall height helps with reach and short height helps with efficiency, but mid height is a peak of the disadvantages of both factors?
Or the sample size is just too small to draw any conclusions
Volleyball makes sense. The higher you are, the better you can spike or block. So unless you’re the libero, you want to be as tall as possible usually.
Surely it also makes a difference which countries teams compete in each sport, for example the Japanese men volleyball team has smaller players than that of the USA.
I love how the French flag is a backdrop here
deleted by creator
