Ranking Sports

To rank sports according to the number of athletes, we first plotted a bar chart, each bar representing a category. As can be seen below, since there were too many categories, the names of sports overlapped to a degree that most of them were indistinguishable. Since there are around thirty sports, using colors is not an ideal option.

We then thought about the word cloud. In word clouds, the size of words is associated with the frequencies. This would make our ranking clearer. We did this visualization with the wordcloud package. See Figure 34.

Figure 34: Word cloud of sports ranking by number of participants in all past Summer Olympics

Figure 34: Word cloud of sports ranking by number of participants in all past Summer Olympics