Olympedia

[bambam1729]

For those on the TAFNews Message Board who have used sports-reference.com/olympics or olympedia.com, I have some rather important news.

A few weeks ago in Lausanne, Switzerland, after 2 years of negotiations, we made a handshake agreement with the IOC for www.olympedia.com to become the official statistical database of the IOC. A contract is now pending as I received the first discussions of the draft today, so I waited until that to let everyone know.

This has been our goal and dream for many years and something I’ve actually been working on since about 1963 when I first had this dream of databasing all the results of the Olympic Games (all sports) even though I did not know what a database was back then.

The site will become public sometime late in 2016 or possibly early in 2017. In addition to providing the IOC with the site, we will have a 4-year contract to service the site and continue to update it (with options for that to continue after 2020), so we will still be the main providers of the information. Working with the IOC will also allow us to get new data into the site much more easily and quickly as direct downloads from the Info systems at each Olympic Games.

I’ll keep you informed of further details as they become known.

[bambam1729]

Sorry, almost forgot - sports-reference.com/olympics will essentially go away, at least for T&F information. But olympedia.com will become public so no real need for it. SR/olympics will continue to have access to our data for baseball, basketball, and ice hockey, to interact with their wonderful sites on those sports, but the other sports will no longer be available on that site.

[DoubleRBar]

Congratulations, bambam1729. That's great news. I've been to the Olympic museum in Lausanne and could easily spend several days there.

[wineturtle]

Adding my congratulations
Thanks to all for all the wonderful work.

[rhymans]

Well done, Bill

[gh]

...
A few weeks ago in Lausanne, Switzerland, after 2 years of negotiations, we made a handshake agreement with the IOC for www.olympedia.com to become the official statistical database of the IOC. A contract is now pending ...

does the contract include a WADA clause?

[bambam1729]

Over the past few years we have been gradually updating Olympedia with what we call MegaUpdates (MUDs). They go sport-by-sport and all the Winter Sports are on online. About 1/2 of the Summer Sports are online also, but until recently this has not included T&F.

However, the MUD has been done for awhile and our IT guy just had to get to it. Happy to announce that the MUD has been done for all track and distance events now. It includes uniform numbers, DNS athletes listed, splits in races where those are known, reaction times (where known), and cleaning up some of the data. Hopefully, Geronimo (IT guy) will soon also put the field event information on there.

So if you use Olympedia, I think you'll like it even more now.

[Pego]

It is hard to improve on perfection. I have loved the site since its inception.

[bambam1729]

It is hard to improve on perfection. I have loved the site since its inception.

Very kind of you, Pego. Hopefully it will be even better when all the MUDs have been input to the site.