Records

The history of Olympic sport is written in records.

Records tell the tale of individual athletes and national teams, of the rise and fall of ancient and modern sports, of changing approaches to athletic training and preparation. They also track the history of human achievements: firsts that are followed by new firsts in the pursuit of ever higher summits of excellence.

Records are achieved by human bodies that compete both against their peers and against precedent, which is to say, against the “record book.” Technologies for the measurement of time and speed are integral to that book because records are measured in time and speed.

Embedded in the word RECORDS are the three keywords –Time, Speed, and Bodies– around which the exhibition that houses a comprehensive data visualization is built. Time is the medium of competition. Speed is the stuff of competition. Bodies are the actors that bring time and speed alive in Olympic competitions. Together, through their interactions, they have shaped the history of the Winter Olympics from the time of their foundation in 1924 to Milano Cortina 2026.

Data Storytelling Installation

RECORDS is the first of three exhibitions being held in preparation for Milan-Cortina 2026 Winter Olympics. At its core it features a data storytelling installation visualizing all 22,560 athletes who have ever participated in the Olympic Winter Games from its inception in 1924 to 2022. The project was developed and designed by Professors Kim Albrecht (metaLAB Berlin, Film University Babelsberg Konrad Wolf) and Jeffrey Schnapp (metaLAB Harvard, Harvard University), who art directed the RECORDS exhibition. The dataset upon which it is based comes from Olympedia.

From February 6, 2024 to February 6, 2025, This interactive installation is on exhibition in the Gallerie di Piedicastello in Trento, Italy: a 6000 sq. meter pair of highway tunnels in Northern Italy repurposed as an experimental history museum as of August 2009. On this page you can explore and interact with the collected dataset of all athletes of the Winter Olympics.

History in data

In the one hundred years from the first Olympic Winter Games in Chamonix in 1924 to the present day, 129 countries have participated in the Olympic Winter Games. They have been held in 24 venues on three continents: Europe, Asia and North America. More than 25,000 athletes have participated, competing in some 40 disciplines and a number of demonstration sports.

The records that document the many aspects of the Olympic Movement tell a richly detailed, multifaceted story that can be experienced at the micro level of individual athletes (the teams they competed on, the medals they won, their gender, height or weight) or at the macro scale of an entire century of Olympic history and tradition.