Today We Bring You a Nerd’s Eye View of the Olympics


A couple of days ago I whined about the annoyingly widespread humanization of Olympic athletes. Enough! We all know that what’s really important about sporting events is statistics, and the more obscure the better. So here are my candidates for nerdiest Olympic coverage so far. First up is Ryan Wallerson’s look at the best athletes of the Sochi games. Not by measuring scores or times or anything normal like that, but by measuring which athlete scored the most standard deviations from the mean in their event. The winner is Poland’s Kamil Stoch in ski jumping:

Next up is a look at which countries have done the best. Not by crudely counting medals or per capita medals or any of that nonsense. This chart looks how countries have done so far compared to how many medals they were predicted to win. The big winner, at 183 percent, is the Netherlands, thanks to their kick-ass performance in speed skating. The most dismal performance so far is from South Korea, at 31 percent. But there are still two days left!

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THE FACTS SPEAK FOR THEMSELVES.

At least we hope they will, because that’s our approach to raising the $350,000 in online donations we need right now—during our high-stakes December fundraising push.

It’s the most important month of the year for our fundraising, with upward of 15 percent of our annual online total coming in during the final week—and there’s a lot to say about why Mother Jones’ journalism, and thus hitting that big number, matters tremendously right now.

But you told us fundraising is annoying—with the gimmicks, overwrought tone, manipulative language, and sheer volume of urgent URGENT URGENT!!! content we’re all bombarded with. It sure can be.

So we’re going to try making this as un-annoying as possible. In “Let the Facts Speak for Themselves” we give it our best shot, answering three questions that most any fundraising should try to speak to: Why us, why now, why does it matter?

The upshot? Mother Jones does journalism you don’t find elsewhere: in-depth, time-intensive, ahead-of-the-curve reporting on underreported beats. We operate on razor-thin margins in an unfathomably hard news business, and can’t afford to come up short on these online goals. And given everything, reporting like ours is vital right now.

If you can afford to part with a few bucks, please support the reporting you get from Mother Jones with a much-needed year-end donation. And please do it now, while you’re thinking about it—with fewer people paying attention to the news like you are, we need everyone with us to get there.

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