The Games of the First Data & Analytics Olympiad

And then the flame is extinguished. It always makes me a little sad.  

I remember that same sentence in all the Closing Ceremonies that I’ve watched so I looked it up. It’s Protocol Element #13 in the Closing Ceremony Factsheet: “Immediately after the address by the President of the OCOG [Olympic Committee Organizing Group], the IOC [International Olympic Committee] President gives the closing speech of the Olympic Games, which he ends with these words….” I just now heard them for the twenty-fifth Winter Olympics.

I’ve always loved the Olympics. It’s a time set apart where the best in the world come together to compete. I wouldn’t ordinarily watch cross country skiing or speed skating or curling or biathlon, but every four years it’s OK. I look forward to it. One of the first games I got for the Apple ][+ was Microsoft Decathlon. You ran by pressing the 1 and 2 keys. I think my parents worried I’d wear them out.

I was a little young in 1972, but I remember cheering for Bruce Jenner and Nadia Comaneci in 1976 in Montreal, for Franz Klammer in Innsbruck, and who could forget 1980 in Lake Placid. I watched the “Miracle on Ice” with my brother and parents. We were all jumping around the family room, counting down that interminable final minute.  

When I was in Middle School I organized a neighborhood games, harvesting the cardboard backs from every pad of paper in the house, cutting circles around a peanut butter jar lid, and rubbing my gold, silver, and bronze crayons down to nubs to make medals hung with Christmas ribbon. 

I don’t remember all of the events. Long jump, both standing and running, certainly. Ten laps around the house. And a two-on-two baseball variation that we played on the narrow, flat part of the back yard with a bat and soccer ball. There was no outfield. Second base was the pine tree at the far end of the yard, and if you hit the ball down over the hill to the left or bounced it off the house to the right it was an automatic three outs (plus you had to fetch the ball out of the pricker bushes). And, of course, you were out of a fielder threw the ball at you and hit you with it.

While watching the Closing Ceremony just now and seeing montages of highlights of the past nineteen days, I wondered what an analytics Olympics would look like. We have spelling bees, geography bees, math bowls, hackathons, scholastic quiz shows, and robotics competitions. Why not data and analytics?

What would the events be? Maybe a sprint to write a query that answers a simple question the fastest. A marathon that involves temporary tables, outer joins, advanced analytics functions, and sub-queries.

And don’t forget the artistic events. Perhaps producing a report where you get style points for aesthetics as well as how well you tell the story with your charts and graphs. Be sure to throw out the top and bottom scores. And, of course, an AI/ML something or other.