Wednesday, February 17, 2010

Map of the Week-The Olympics GeoView

I love the Olympics. Especially the Winter Games. However, the Official Vancouver 2010 site seems to lack a basic map showing the various event locations. Each venue has a diagram and map of the immediate area but there's nothing that shows the whole picture*. For example, where is Cypress Mountain? Is it on the way to Whistler? These are the kind of questions that maybe only I care about.
*Note: it turns out there are some better maps - see update at the end of this post

There is an interactive map but when you click it you get this googly mess:

It's way too busy (until you use the filters) and you have to click each site to get the name. Also when you click a site it changes your view to accommodate the large block of googleized text.

OK - enough complaining. What they do have that is interesting is the GeoView. This is an interactive world map showing the countries by medal count, events and number of athletes with various filters. So for example you can see the number of ski jumpers per country or the total number of female athletes in the 1984 Olympics. Here are the countries by total number of athletes at the 1924 Winter Olympics in Chamonix, France.


This is the same map for the 2010 Olympics.


I also like the cute sustainability diagrams. Here is one for Whistler Creekside. An explanation is here.



And of course who can't resist the Google Earth views with building models?




 


Or the Google street views?



























Finally, here is the current medal count (subject to change at any minute).


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Update (Feb 25th) :

There are some decent maps after all. I'd like to think they made these available because I complained, but probably they've been up on the site all along. They're just difficult to find. You have to go to the Transportation section of the site. These are large Acrobat .pdf files that may take some time to download. Here are the thumbnail images.



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