Putting Medal Winners on the Map

Ordnance Survey (UK) data is being used to celebrate the success of Great Britain’s medal-winning athletes this summer. Great Britain’s national mapping agency is continuing to track where medal-winning athletes come from, to find out whether there are hotspots around the country that produce medal-winning people.

Following the enormous success of Team GB earlier in August, where Ordnance Survey’s medal map became a sea of gold, silver and bronze markers, it’s now time to support medal-winning Paralympians.

As with the Team GB medal map, the map has been created using OS OpenSpace and is being updated daily. Whenever a member of the ParalympicsGB team wins a medal, a marker will be added to their place of birth as identified on the ParalympicsGB website. For team events, each member of the team will be added individually.

As the national mapping agency for Great Britain, the organisation’s data covers England, Scotland and Wales, while the ParalympicsGB team includes athletes from Great Britain, Northern Ireland and crown dependencies. To ensure every athlete can celebrate their success on the medal map, Ordnance Survey are adding any ParalympicsGB team member born outside Great Britain by instead adding their marker to their current home town. Where this is also outside Great Britain, the marker will be placed at the spot they won their medal.

OS OpenSpace is a free service that allows users to embed maps, covering the whole of Great Britain, into their web applications, if they are free to consumers. OS OpenSpace uses a JavaScript application programming interface (API) and does not include any advertising in the maps.