Olympics Facts and Figures

Facts and Figures needed for the Games of the XXIX Olympiad

Mar 19, 2008

Information for fans looking for official Beijing 2008 Olympics competitions and results. Also, data on world rankings and published world and Olympic records.

With the Games of the XXIX Olympiad approaching, scheduled to start August 8-24, 2008, it is a good idea for fans of Olympic sport to locate reference websites for information and statistics to enable following the progress of favourite Olympians. An official Olympic Games website makes available information about all competitions and results. Other websites provide data about world rankings in their specific sports, others still publish world and Olympic records.

Beijing 2008 Official Website - Find an Event

The Official Beijing 2008 website contains news releases and has links to Olympic education, culture, torch relay, sports and venues and more. Below is the link to the main page, or go directly to the competitions page.

The competitions page lets one to navigate between different sports and view different events. Simply select the sport from the dropdown and click on the event of choice. At present, there is no hot link on individual events to check details but it is anticipated that as results become available this is where it is likely to be found, so stay tuned.

World Rankings

One can find out current world rankings of an athlete, swimmer, boxer, etc. , but websites tend to report only on their own specific sport. Rankings are based on the last performance recorded and so that printed dates vary between competitors. These dates should only be viewed as indicative. For example, an athlete ranked at number ten may not have raced recently, therefore may or may not currently perform at that reported level. True performance would only be known privately by the athlete. Various sports organisations publishing world rankings are given below:

For other sports not appearing in the above list, one may do a Google search with keywords “World Rankings” together with the sport of interest.

World and Olympic Records

The common cliché is that records are meant to be broken and this is the expectation at every official sports event. The following Olympic site has interesting information related to previous Olympics and contains copious world and Olympic records. Below is a link to the main page, or go directly to the records page.

Medals Table

The ardent fan will no doubt be interested in a table of standings of various nations. The position of the nation, the number of gold, silver and bronze medals and the overall medal count. This information should be updated on the official site when the competition starts.